MonoSphere bolsters storage capacity management

Latest upgrade to Storage Horizon makes it one of the most useful tools in a storage managers arsenal

Developments of the week in storage

MonoSphere, a storage capacity management software vendor, last week unveiled the latest version of its Storage Horizon software, the upgrade makes it one of the most useful tools in a storage managers arsenal.

Storage Horizon 3.7 expands on its support for VMware virtualized environments, includes a new chargeback capability and analysis of databases. In addition, Storage Horizon now supports EMC Celerra and IBM DS and Enterprise Storage Servers.

The software discovers how VMware hosts are using storage and details the relationships between LUNs, ESX Servers, the VMware file system and VMware virtual disks (VMDK), as well as the guest operating systems and file systems running on ESX host computers. It helps determine when additional storage capacity is required.

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MonoSphere, a storage capacity management software vendor, last week unveiled the latest version of its Storage Horizon software, the upgrade makes it one of the most useful tools in a storage managers arsenal.

Storage Horizon 3.7 expands on its support for VMware virtualized environments, includes a new chargeback capability and analysis of databases. In addition, Storage Horizon now supports EMC Celerra and IBM DS and Enterprise Storage Servers.

The software discovers how VMware hosts are using storage and details the relationships between LUNs, ESX Servers, the VMware file system and VMware virtual disks (VMDK), as well as the guest operating systems and file systems running on ESX host computers. It helps determine when additional storage capacity is required.

The chargeback reporting feature in Storage Horizon 3.7 has been automated. IT resources can be grouped by business unit, department, application, specific hardware and then analyzed to show the cost of raw storage and actual array usage. A comprehensive view of the storage environment includes hosts, arrays, and LUNs; the total configured raw and configured usable storage; usage and utilization; and calculations of the cost of raw configured and unused storage.

Further, Storage Horizon 3.7 includes several analytical reports that recognize wasted, unused and under-utilized storage assets, allowing storage managers to allocate storage efficiently. These analytic reports include storage consumption by volume group, a free pool report, a LUN to disk analysis and a breakdown of dark storage.

Storage Horizon 3.7 also includes features for analyzing the storage consumption of Oracle, Microsoft SQL and Sybase databases, as well as Microsoft Exchange. Users can view details of the database to see forecasts of its table spaces and data files and view log allocations. The new version also supports Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC).

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Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.