Free Unisys Service Identifies How to Reduce Data Storage Cost, Risk
Free analytics reveals environmental, business costs of storage waste; suggests plans to make storage more cost-efficient
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Unisys Corporation has teamed up with software developer Storage Fusion Ltd. to offer a global storage resource analysis (SRA) service that helps companies optimise data centre efficiency and eliminate expensive storage costs.
Using the service, businesses can access a portal featuring a headline report about their system utilization, capacity allocation, and disk tiering. The report includes an environmental module that shows power consumed by storage hardware down to the individual disk drive level. The report is free for companies with a minimum of 50 terabytes (TB) of data.
This intelligence can help businesses reduce their power consumption by up to 50 percent, improve storage utilization by 30 percent, and cut annual IT costs. The intelligence will also equip CIOs with the information they need to plan the storage architecture that is right for their organizations, cut operational and unnecessary capital expenses, and maximize the performance of their storage systems.
The SRA solution enables organizations to improve the way they evaluate and optimize their storage environments. Using software-as-a-service (SaaS), the self-service portal can deliver detailed analytics within hours by cutting through the complexity of heterogeneous storage environments.
The Unisys service is the result of a Unisys survey, published in 2009, about customer storage challenges. Unisys interviewed 80 leading European business managers and CIOs, each responsible for more than 400TB of data, from a wide cross-section of industries including the financial, public sector, utilities, and transportation sectors.
According to the survey, more than 40 percent of businesses have limited to no visibility into their existing data storage needs, and almost half struggle to forecast storage capacity. By contrast, best-practice storage utilization is typically around 75 per cent. Based on direct feedback from the multiple large organizations surveyed, Unisys confirmed that only 20 per cent of businesses achieve that level of utilization or above.
Nikki Wilton, director of information and data management at Unisys, noted, “Most organizations struggle with storage complexity and cost because they don’t know what they have or what they really need. Consequently, they often try to manage growth by just buying more. Even more alarming, some run the risk of data loss through a simple lack of visibility. For example, one large public-sector organisation that signed up for our headline report discovered that large amounts of data were unprotected due to simple configuration issues. Just imagine the reputational damage if the problem had remained undetected and data had been lost as a result.”
Wilton continued, “The tools available in the vendor community do a great job of day-to-day management, but none of them can easily produce a report of this quality which pinpoints immediate areas for concern and suggests an effective plan for the future.”
More information is available at www.unisys.com.