Storage Strategies Now in Love With StorTrends iDATA by American Megatrends

StorTrends, an American Megatrends, Inc.’s division (AMI) announced that an independent lab test conducted by Storage Strategies NOW (SSG-NOW) has found its iDATA (Intelligent Data Analysis Tracking Application) to be an “invaluable” tool for accurately assessing an IT infrastructure in order to find and eliminate pain points, avoid business disruption and make informed storage purchase decisions. 

During the live hands-on review, iDATA demonstrated its ability to assess a range of IT infrastructure features and functionality including: throughput, IO/s, CPU, memory, network and storage utilization, R/W ratios, I/O size, peak queue depths and peak latencies, etc., and also make predictions and recommendations that enable IT to make advantageous adjustments to existing infrastructure and processes, as well as proactively plan for the future.
 
“While there are various network, server and storage monitoring tools, most are difficult to deploy and manage, proprietary, and/or limited in scope – not to mention expensive,” said Logan G. Harbaugh, SSG-NOW product validation analyst. “Appropriate for a highly experienced or inexperienced storage administrator, the StorTrends iDATA tool delivered on its promise of straightforward installation and ongoing management via its user-friendly menu-driven administration. It was easily configured to scan and assess the entire heterogeneous environment or drill-down into specifics, in a manual or automatic fashion.  It then saved and sent the test data, analyzed results and recommendations, exactly as specified.”
 
“For administrators trying to find a bottleneck in their system to planning for and justifying upgrades to speed or capacity of storage systems, the capabilities of this tool are invaluable,” Harbaugh concluded. “And, since it is free-of-charge for a limited time, there’s no time like the present to try it.“

The detailed commentary covers:

• Installation: Self-driven from AMI StorTrends website; simple and menu-driven; can monitor as many Windows 2003, 2008 and 2012 and VMware servers
• Monitoring Period: Seven-day default period (shorter timelines can be specified); collected data saved and encrypted; manual or automatic analysis options follow; nothing personal or identifiable collected
• Analysis: Statistics delivered as numerical summaries and graphs over time; sample graphs included in report
• Summary Report: Includes analysis summary, historical tracking, capacity planner and recommendations

“Our research finds that one of the key reasons storage installations fail is that IT administrators lack the accurate information needed to properly provision the performance, capacity and throughput the environment requires to deliver optimum storage efficiency,” said Deni Connor, founding analyst, SSG-NOW in the iDATA launch announcement. “Are you considering SSDs in an all-flash or hybrid storage array? How much hot data or active data do you have within your existing environment and how much SSD or flash space do you need? Don’t worry, most IT Directors and IT Admins don’t know the answer either. The StorTrends iDATA tool is a free and powerful way to answer this question and many more. It provides the key details organizations need, such as the amount of IO/s a SAN requires, the environment’s expected growth rate and the amount of hot data or active data – to more accurately achieve your storage goals and eliminate the need to overprovision costly storage resources.”
 
Said Justin Bagby, director, StorTrends: “StorTrends iDATA’s ability to assess the entire end-to-end IT environment, as well as identify active/hot data, profile group and/or specific user requirements, and track specific performance metrics has been invaluable for our customers and IT professionals that have downloaded the tool since its launch last month to eliminate most of the ‘fire-fighting’ that often occurs, and instead proactively and accurately create a strategy and budget that eliminates the need to overprovision costly storage resources.”
 
Complete lab report