Storage Management & Assessment

Optimizing Storage for Growth

PROCESSES THAT IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF DATA STORAGE RESOURCES

Increasing storage capacity might be the easiest solution to the ever-growing quantities of data, but if you don’t know how to maximize your current storage, this approach can quickly lead to a significant investment that is underutilized and disorganized.  We can help maximize your organization’s current resources through various techniques, software, hardware, and optimized processes. Storage management processes can deal with local or external storage such as NAS, SAN, USBs, SDDs, HDD, the Cloud, etc. We evaluate your storage needs based on required performance, availability of data, recoverability, and capacity.  

REDUCED CAPITAL AND OPERATING COSTS

The most significant expense when it comes to storage is maintaining and operating the infrastructure. Additional storage investments can be reduced or delayed because the existing storage infrastructure is being used to its fullest.

EASIER MANAGEMENT

Storage management systems can help organizations save time through automated tasks and centralized consoles.   It can also reduce the number of IT staff needed to operate the storage infrastructure. Storage management can also make virtualized or cloud environments easier to manage from a single location.

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

One of the main goals of storage management is to improve the performance of the existing storage resources.  For example, compressing data can dramatically reduce the amount of storage and improve file transfer speeds. Automatic storage provisioning can reduce the time it takes to provision storage resources.

SPEED AND FLEXIBILITY

Optimized storage infrastructures can work in real-time and adapt to sudden changes in storage demands. For example, storage replication is a managed service that replicates stored data in real-time. Storage virtualization can also help improve flexibility and reduce wasted storage.  Virtualization can create a pool of physical storage from multiple devices into a single logical storage device. Storage capacity can be easily relocated as the business changes needs.

Higher Availability

This is probably one of the biggest benefits of storage management. Technologies such as Replication, Snapshot and Mirroring, Migration, and Disaster and Recovery can help achieve higher availability and reliability on data.

Our Approach

Our Storage Management Services enable organizations to cope with the growing volume of data and variety of information. From virtualization to multi-tiered architectures and hybrid infrastructures, we help define strategies, design, and deploy solutions and help ensure successful ongoing management. We don’t just look at the storage infrastructure, we look at how organizations create, share, and store data and assess its value to the organization.

Storage Assessment Overview

Storage Assessments provide a way to assess, manage, and implement reliable long-term data storage solutions. Having the right technology is only part of the data equation. Knowing how to plan a complete system, manage it, and not pay too much for it are the things that set us apart. Our goal is to create a solid roadmap that adds value long after it’s been implemented.

Approach

High-Level Assessment

As part of our Storage Assessment Service, our initial task will be to conduct a high-level assessment of the entire storage environment including on-premise and cloud implementations.

Collect Data

Collect data about the storage portfolio, storage processes & tools used, evaluate the team skillset, management practices in use and strategic business priorities.

Risk & GAP Analysis

Provide risk and GAP analysis of the current state, with measurements against industry best practices for people, processes, technology, and financial impact.

Recommendations & Roadmap

Recommended next steps for remediation improvements and cost saving measures including a detailed roadmap.

Deliverables

The storage assessment is designed to provide the necessary information required by storage managers to make informed decisions about storage usage, forecasting, aligning back-up and recovery operations with business requirements and developing the data retention policies best suited for their business. Although every storage assessment may have different goals and initial areas of focus, our deliverables for each engagement are relatively consistent.

  • Current state of findings
  • High-level recommendations
  • High-level roadmap with milestones
  • Executive Presentation

Summary

The storage assessment will provide essential information required to optimize your storage environment on an ongoing basis, enabling a wide variety of cost savings and management reducing practices that can be automated. The assessment is a low impact service that provides storage administrators visibility and a greater understanding of their data and storage environment, so they can make informed storage and data management decisions.