Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2010/03/02/unisys_storage_fusion/
Unisys flags up customer storage waste
80% of large storage shops inefficient, badly run
Posted in Channel, 2nd March 2010 10:36 GMT
Unisys wants to alert its customers to their storage waste by offering a free analytics run, and then help them fix the outflow of wasted storage cash.
Storage Fusion, which provides the analytics software, offers it as a service. Its software is given access to a customers' storage infrastucture and goes through its connections, devices, nooks and crannies searching out things like utilisation, capacity allocation, disk tiering, and power consumed by storage hardware right down to the individual disk drives. Customers access their report through a web portal, it all being a self-service deal.
Storage Fusion makes its money by selling the analytics service, with customers using the report to rein in excess and unnecessary storage spending and make their existing kit work more effectively.
Unisys is partnering with Storage Fusion to offer its customers this analysis of their installed storage. An analytics run and report is free for companies with a minimum of 50TB of data.
Unisys reckons it can find so much waste and inefficiency in a 50+ terabyte shop that fixing it provides a return for the customer, and a profit for itself as well as covering the cost of the Storage Fusion service.
It says the storage intelligence they get can help businesses reduce power consumption by 50 per cent, improve storage utilisation by 30 per cent and potentially save millions in annual IT costs. They can also make better storage plans for the future.
All this is feasible because most customers with large storage shops run them badly - not that Unisys says that. However, it ran a survey that found that "more than 40 per cent of businesses have limited visibility, or almost none, into their existing data storage needs, and almost half struggle to forecast storage capacity."
Eighty per cent of its surveyed businesses failed to achieve the top 20 per cent's best practice level of 75 per cent storage utilisation, meaning plenty of scope for service engagements to bring them up nearer to best practice levels.
Nikki Wilton, director of information and data management at Unisys, said: “One large public-sector organisation that signed up for our... report discovered that large amounts of data were unprotected due to simple configuration issues."
These customers are running the storage part of their IT shops blindfold, but they got into such a tricky situation the Storage Fusion report can, Unisys says, immediately pinpoint areas of concern and enable them to do something about it. ®