Unisys Teams with Storage Fusion

Unisys Corporation has teamed up with software developer Storage Fusion Ltd. to offer a global Storage Resource Analysis (SRA) service, designed to help companies optimise data-centre efficiency and eliminate expensive storage costs.

Through this service, businesses can use a portal to access a headline report on their system utilisation, capacity allocation and disk tiering. The report includes an environmental module that shows power consumed by storage hardware down to individual disk drives. The report is free for companies with a minimum of 50 terabytes (TB) of data.

This intelligence can help businesses reduce their power consumption by 50 percent, improve storage utilisation by 30 percent and potentially save millions in annual IT costs. The intelligence will also equip CIOs with the information they need to plan the storage architecture that is right for their organisations, cut operational and unnecessary capital expenses and maximise the performance of their storage systems.

Before the SRA headline report became available, information technology research and advisory company Gartner, Inc. noted that it could "take weeks or even months to create a storage strategy that reflects organisational goals."

Valdis Filks, Research Director for Gartner, notes that storage management has become an increasingly complex and critical competency: "Organisations need to deal with soaring amounts of data on a tightening budget, while legal and corporate governance issues can complicate the processes and infrastructure. The data stored in the storage infrastructure is often the lifeblood of an organisation and, therefore, a significant and critical resource."

Unique Service Based on Research
into Users’ Most Pressing Concerns
The SRA solution enables organizations to revolutionise the way they evaluate and optimise their storage environments. Using an innovative Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model, the self-service portal can deliver detailed analytics within hours by cutting through the complexity of heterogeneous storage environments.

This unique Unisys service is the result of a Unisys survey, published in 2009, into customer storage challenges. Unisys interviewed 80 leading European business managers and CIOs, each responsible for more than 400TB of data, from a wide cross-section of industries including the financial, public sector, utilities and transportation sectors.

According to the survey, 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. By contrast, best-practice storage utilisation is typically around 75 percent. Based on direct feedback from the multiple large organisations surveyed, Unisys confirmed that only 20 percent of businesses achieve that level of utilisation or above.

Nikki Wilton, director of information and data management, Unisys, commented: "Most organisations struggle with storage complexity and cost because they don’t know what they have or what they really need. Consequently, they often try to manage growth by just buying more. Even more alarming, some run the very real risk of data loss through a simple lack of visibility. For example, one large public-sector organisation that signed up for our headline report discovered that large amounts of data were unprotected due to simple configuration issues. Just imagine the reputational damage if the problem had remained undetected and data had been lost as a result."

Wilton continued: "The tools available in the vendor community do a great job of day-to-day management, but none of them can easily produce a report of this quality which pinpoints immediate areas for concern and suggests an effective plan for the future."