By Dave Simpson
According to survey results from Bloor Research, enterprise storage migration and data center consolidation projects have a success rate of only 16%, where “success” is defined as being on time and on budget.
That’s the problem that SANpulse hopes to solve with the introduction of its first licensed software product. Dubbed SANatomy, the software enables IT organizations to assess a SAN environment during the planning phase of a data/storage/SAN migration project.
Prior to the introduction of SANatomy, SANpulse was primarily a professional services organization focused on storage migration services for large enterprises. SANatomy is based on technology that SANpulse has been using for those services since 2005.
The reason for the low success rate of storage migration projects is that IT organizations don’t fully understand their SAN environments or the risks associated with guesswork in a migration project, which can lead to financial loss in the tens of millions of dollars, according to Marie-Pierre Belanger, SANpulse’s vice president of product management.
The financial loss comes from the need to maintain two sets of storage environments and to pay multiple vendors during the delay that occurs from a stalled migration project.
Storage migration initiatives typically involve switching array vendors or refreshing arrays from the same vendor, and major driving forces behind migration projects include data center consolidation, technology refreshes, virtualization, cloud computing, compliance and “green” initiatives, according to Belanger.
SANatomy provides a SAN assets discovery engine that generates detailed, migration-related information about a SAN infrastructure, including disk arrays, switches, servers and HBAs. The information is delivered as reports that can be housed in a SANpulse cloud or in an internal private cloud.
“The primary goals are to reduce the risks associated with data migration and to provide faster implementation,” says Belanger.
SANatomy provides an alternative to internally-developed software and vendor-specific tools from third parties or the equipment manufacturers.
“We overlap a little with SRM tools from a discovery perspective,” says Belanger, “but we’re focused on migration, not monitoring and performance management. Our primary competition is home-grown tools.”
After using SANatomy in the information-gathering stage of a migration project, IT organizations can perform the actual migration themselves or contract with SANpulse or other third-party data migration services providers for the design, implementation and execution phases of the migration process. And after the migration project is completed, IT organizations can use SANatomy on an ongoing basis for decision making in the storage lifecycle management process.
Pricing for the agent-less SANatomy software is based on the number of servers, rather than capacity. Prices start at $22,000 per year for 50 to 250 servers, and range up to $200,000 for more than 5,000 servers. After the first year, the software is available on a subscription basis, with per-month subscriptions ranging from $1,000 for 50 to 250 servers up to $10,000 for more than 5,000 servers.
source: www.infostor.com
