Business issues
Consistent market-share gains and a forecast for sustained growth led this cable-television provider to seek a strategic tool to more efficiently collect and analyze the infrastructure of its two data centers and seven remote locations. The company made heterogeneous device support a top priority due to its multi-vendor mix of solutions from EMC, VERITAS, LEGATO and others. IT managers also wanted policy-based threshold alerts and support for both their disk and backup environments.

Solutions
The firm deployed Storability® Global Storage Manager (GSM) software, after it outscored its competitors on technology and the ability to meet all of the company’s requirements.

Financial benefits
The GSM software allows administrators to manage the enterprise-wide infrastructure from a single location, eliminating the need to place specially-trained staff at each of their sites. The application’s reporting tools increased legacy-disk utilization rates, which has allowed new storage purchases to be postponed or eliminated.

Business benefits
Threshold alerting has significantly decreased network downtime, providing greater data and application availability and thus adding to productivity. GSM software’s heterogeneous device support frees IT managers to negotiate with a variety of vendors, which has improved negotiated prices and has prevented vendor lock-in.

Technology benefits
The Global Storage Manager software has simplified management of the cable company’s 75 terabytes of disk storage by providing a common method for gathering and reporting information. Report metrics help administrators understand exactly what storage exists, where it resides, how it is being used, how usage patterns are changing, how quickly storage consumption is growing and why. The solution’s automated policy-based management functionality—which notifies administrators when predetermined thresholds are reached—is a proactive tool to resolve potential problems before they impact business operations.