NetApp SANscreen 6.0 SRM Eliminates Guesswork

NetApp, Inc. announced SANscreen 6.0, the latest edition of its storage management solution, to enable service providers and enterprises to optimize storage efficiency and performance across their entire virtualized infrastructures. SANscreen 6.0 is now also integrated with BMC Software’s Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This combined offering gives customers the ability to extend their IT service management solutions to the storage domain for increased visibility, control, and efficiency.

Even though storage efficiency technologies offer unmistakable benefits and cost savings, adoption is not universal because customers cannot always quantify the impact on their storage environment. SANscreen 6.0 addresses this issue through its unique ability to measure, analyze, and mitigate the risks associated with using NetApp or third-party storage efficiency technologies such as thin provisioning and deduplication in virtualized and cloud infrastructures. As more virtual applications are added to an environment, SANscreen 6.0 scales and delivers constant monitoring and analyses to help IT organizations identify efficiency metrics critical to application availability and performance. As a result, customers achieve greater efficiencies, scalability, and cost savings, and they also gain a clearer view of their environment, taking the guesswork out of when and where to apply storage efficiency technologies.

"SANscreen 6.0 now offers our customers increased visibility into and analysis of their NetApp storage environments in the context of service levels, efficiencies, and business applications," said John Bacci, director of engineering for The Ergonomic Group, Inc., a NetApp SANscreen channel partner. "The fact that SANscreen 6.0 can also show detailed trends and risk reports for deduplicated and thin-provisioned storage is a true differentiator, and provides our customers with tremendous value in an economy where cost savings is a high priority."

SANscreen 6.0 not only builds on its ability to manage large-scale heterogeneous environments, it now manages NetApp-only storage environments too. This helps customers to intelligently measure and control their virtual infrastructure and optimize capacity utilization, availability, and performance. In fact, at least one customer reports having realized combined capital expenditure, operational expenditure, and service quality savings of more than $850,000 annually with SANscreen.

SANscreen Integration with BMC Software
The integration of SANscreen with BMC Atrium CMDB plays an integral role in the transformation to a service-oriented IT infrastructure. BMC Cloud Service Management leverages the complete view and analysis of the environment in the BMC Atrium CMDB to quickly provision services and accurately remediate service-level degradation, saving time and money by improving service levels.

"By integrating SANscreen into BMC Atrium CMDB, customers are now able to get a holistic view of all of the different components of their IT environment," said John Peters, vice president and general manager of the Atrium product line at BMC. "This enables service providers and enterprises to more effectively and efficiently manage their cloud environments, resulting in improved service quality. The integration is also another proof point of NetApp’s and BMC’s commitment to work together to help customers on their journey to the cloud."

"SANscreen 6.0 provides customers with a best in class, end-to-end management solution that goes well beyond the scope of what point solutions can do and is far less complex than traditional storage resource management offerings," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances for NetApp. "With SANscreen 6.0 and our integration with BMC, customers are able to gain more control and insight of their virtual environments, helping to improve operational efficiency and gain a greater return on investment."

The SANscreen product suite offers end-to-end infrastructure discovery, service-level monitoring, analytics (planning, forecasting, and chargeback), change management, and impact analysis for virtual infrastructures affecting storage efficiency and optimization. SANscreen enables customers to manage storage as a true end-to-end IT service, which reduces capital and operational costs, increases efficiency, and improves application service quality (availability and performance). Furthermore, the SANscreen detailed analytics help customers reallocate storage as needed, identify storage hot spots, and plan for and adapt to changing business goals.

SANscreen 6.0 is available today.