GAMING

DataCore Software today announced the release of its SANmaestro Utilization and Analysis Suite, an innovative software environment and resource analysis-monitoring package for Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Windows systems. The Challenge - Obtaining and working with the information necessary to manage assets and resources within a large storage or Windows network can be a formidable task. The network's scale presents challenges to gathering the data needed to address current and future utilization, capacity planning, performance profiling, system-wide data analysis, and communication of that analysis to those who control IT purchases and budgets. For example, many companies have begun "billing" or "charge-backs" of IT costs to company profit centers or affiliates based on usage or quality of service. But in a large IT environment, allocating costs and auditing usage and service can be a monumental job. The Solution - SANmaestro software is a powerful "spreadsheet simple" approach to monitoring, analyzing and reporting critical storage and Windows events as well as performance metrics and utilization information across large or complex environments. It is quick to set up, easy to operate, and generates useful reports, charts and trend analysis. SANmaestro gathers network-wide instrumentation data in real-time in a central location to improve administrative productivity and decision-making. SANmaestro - Maximizing your Storage and Windows Assets Every business with large storage needs or a Windows network can benefit by monitoring and analyzing the utilization and performance of its networked IT assets. Whether these enterprises seek to either analyze the utilization of their SANsymphony- or SANmelody-managed storage resources over extended periods of time or analyze metrics from a multitude of Windows systems, or they require a combination of both, SANmaestro is the right solution. Moreover, SANmaestro is the appropriate solution for businesses that: * Require an audit trail of historical I/O behaviour and capacity consumption. * Want to generate input to billing and charge-back applications based on resources or storage utilization. * Need to profile performance trends and identify hotspots. * Seek to use prior trends to predict future needs (capacity planning). * Need to cost justify resource utilization for budgeting and ROI analysis. * Want the data and inputs to be able to perform system health checks. * Seek to better understand loads and system characteristics during periods of peak activity. * Wish to determine the physical metrics behind virtual storage resources. SANmaestro may be used to display the actual physical space consumed over time by specific applications that rely on SANsymphony's and SANmelody's 'Virtual Capacity' auto provisioning service. As with any virtualized or abstracted resource, traditional host-based SRM tools are unable to determine how much real capacity is being allocated to a logical volume, thereby giving a false indication of capacity utilization. SANmaestro enables IT management to review and to take actions based on a multitude of metrics and service levels over variable time periods. Unexpected peaks and bottlenecks visually jump out from the built-in charts, where these anomalies can be associated with specific points in time and critical business events. That helps IT managers troubleshoot what may have otherwise been interpreted as unrelated incidents. With little training, one can quickly isolate unusual patterns over a relatively long period and then drill down to get more granular details. SANmaestro provides a rich environment that enables administrators and IT management to: * Collect system performance and utilization metrics across many systems in real-time. * Analyze historical data accumulated over long periods (up to 2 years). * Chart, tabulate and analyze selected metrics with spreadsheet simplicity and flexibility to assist in visualizing trends, hot spots and system historical behavior. * Perform "what if" analyses. * Profile performance and usage patterns and trends. * Develop customized reports, charts with SANmaestro's extensible development toolkit - a simple-to-use dynamic spreadsheet with an integrated graphics editor. * Export historical data to third-party tools and network management frameworks for further analysis, processing or audit reports. o Export to Excel, SAS, SAP, Oracle, and other popular data manipulation packages o Output to custom billing and/or charge-back applications SANmaestro - Optimizing your SAN SANmaestro enables organizations to monitor and analyze how their application servers consume valuable resources over time, such as storage - defined in terms of disk capacity, physical ports, I/O bandwidth and throughput. By combining SANsymphony's centralized storage pooling and storage domains with SANmaestro's non-intrusive probes and charting capabilities, the IT department can gauge which applications are the most resource hungry and then factor these figures into their billing, charge-back, capacity planning, and budget justification. An export facility makes it simple to further process results in Excel, SAS, SAP, Oracle, SQL Server and other familiar packages already used for those purposes. "We have been working on SANmaestro for more than four years," said Ziya Aral, Chief Technical Officer, DataCore Software. "I believe it very neatly meets the specification of allowing the monitoring and control of any storage domain server for any task that is conceivable, while still remaining simple and intuitive enough to be used for everyday tasks." Each of those requirements is challenging in its own right," he continued. "But combining them has proved daunting for the entire industry. SANmaestro measures up on all counts." Extensible for Customization For those organizations whose monitoring requirements exceed the scope of the built-in charts, DataCore offers a SANmaestro extensible spreadsheet and display builder for more sophisticated processing, analysis and presentation. Availability SANmaestro is available today. Pricing for SANmaestro starts at under $15,000 per network site. Site-specific customization is also available.