Raxco Software Unveils Thin-Provisionning Optimization Tool

Raxco
Software Inc. announced PerfectStorage,
a tool that helps automate the task of reclaiming wasted space in
thin-provisioned environments.

The product is designed for businesses
running thin provisioning in a virtual environment or in a physical
environment on a SAN.

It helps reclaim space for thin
provisioned drives via zero fill or SCSI UNMAP. It is an automated
storage management solution for these drives, whether in a physical
or virtual environment.

Benefits:

• Maximizing the benefits of over
  allocation on thin-provisioned drives

• Helps automate reclaiming free space
  using zero fill or SCSI UNMAP with minimal resource usage

• Identifying how much space is
  reclaimable

• Replacing SDelete and other command
  line tools to automatically reclaim space in production environments

• Delaying or avoiding expensive hardware
  purchases

• The product has built-in automated
  scheduling capabilities and reporting features.

"If you are concerned about
stretching your budget to support growth without compromise including
using data footprint reduction (DFR) techniques such as archiving,
backup modernize, compression, dedupe and thin provisioning, why
wouldn’t you go the next step finding and then reclaiming your
orphaned or stranded storage, both thick and thin provisioned?"
asked Greg Schulz, founder and senior advisory consultant at the Server
and StorageIO Group.

"Before
PerfectStorage, I didn’t even consider reclaiming free space on our
EqualLogic SAN because it is too risky to shut down a Windows
production server that didn’t have the iSCSI unmap feature,"
said Jérôme
Bongrand, networks
and system
manager for Fives
Stein, a large engineering and manufacturing
companies. "With PerfectStorage,
the approach is simple, saving me valuable time, and all done without
taking down a production server."

To zero fill a thin-provisioned disk
drive in order to reclaim unused free space, you need to use a
command-line utility such as SDelete. But SDelete and other command
line utilities are cumbersome, resource-intensive and prone to human
error. They require applications to be shut down, making them
virtually unusable in a production environment. They also require
ongoing maintenance and have no ability to tell a storage manager how
much space is available to be reclaimed.

These shortcomings and more are
addressed by this tool through the automation of previously manual
tasks. Storage managers can now obtain reports on how much space can
be reclaimed from thin-provisioned drives, thereby eliminating
guesswork. By automating the process, storage managers are able to be
more proactive and become better stewards of an organization’s
storage management process.

"The need to help automate
thin-provisioned storage reclamation has been building for years, and
we’re excited to deliver a solution that meets this demand,"
said Robert Nolan, president and CEO of Raxco. "The
early PerfectStorage users have confirmed it delivers huge time
savings, greatly enhanced storage management and the ability to delay
additional hardware procurements, thereby making it a key component
of an organization’s storage management portfolio."

Pricing starts at $749.99 for a
single server, with reduced per-server pricing for larger
quantity purchases, and can be purchased directly from Raxco or resellers.