Connect your #storage environment to the #cloud with IBM Storage Insights Now more #cognitive and #AI capabilities!

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Now is a great time for you to plan your #storage growth for your company moving forward. IBM Storage Insights, an #IBMCloud-based offering, increases in value over time and offers unparalleled visibility to help you manage your storage infrastructure.

Already one of the best time to value investments, IBM Storage Insights just got better! Checkout the new proactive #AI and #cognitive storage management capabilities that enable a high service quality through error reduction and consequently faster incident resolution. There is currently an early user program available at the IBM Marketplace where you can see all your storage from a single pane of glass. The intuitive interface includes quick views of storage from the server, application and file system perspective. In a few steps, you can customize application and department views—email, SAP or recovery site storage, for example. These views enable you to report on application or departmental use of storage, as well as provide opportunities to optimize performance and save money.

A typical use case involves Company A purchasing #IBMStorage and an IBM Storage Insights subscription. A few months later, when your business and storage capacity demands grow, the growth raised a concern about a sizing review for the higher IT management. The CIO of Company A wants Bob, the storage administrator and his team to predict current and future capacity utilization for the next 6 - 24 months. The company must not run out of storage capacity. Consider what Bob and his storage team can do to cater to this critical business need.

The CIO wants to avoid the following situations:

• Continuing to add storage blindly
• Needless spending on storage
• Wasting money to buy unneeded storage
• Performance issues to become a constraint for the business

Normally, in a routine scenario like this, Bob and his storage team cannot do much. For action to be possible, they must take manual readings of the data for several months, use a scripting technique, and spend several laborious hours extracting this information, or purchase an on-premise monitoring tool.

IBM Storage Insights can answer all the challenges in a matter of minutes. After registration, the service is up and running quickly with actionable insights in less than 30 minutes.

The IBM Storage Insights data not only gives the current statistics but also provides valuable insights into the future growth projections. It can also help address the following concerns:

• What is the current block and file level capacity utilization?
• How much storage has been used in the last 3 months (file and block level)?
• What will be the future storage utilization in the next 3 months (can be up to 24 months)?
• Will storage space be filled soon?
• What is the data growth rate? Is it steady growth or does it have some abnormal behavior?

Storage capacity projection is the analysis that an organization carries out to assess the storage growth and utilization trends in its environment.

IBM Storage Insights provides the most necessary data that might prove useful for the CIO’s capacity projection and planning requirements.

As you can see from the picture above, the single pane of glass dashboard for the storage infrastructure has different views for capacity, performance, and tier planning. Both block-level and file-level storage trend data can be done with IBM Storage Insights. Projections with IBM Storage Insights predictive data analysis can be seen after only a few hours of data collection. The longer the data is collected, the more accurate the predictions IBM Storage Insights can make.

With the data extracted in minutes, not hours, Bob and his the team can now respond to the his CIO about the capacity utilization and trends. This response helps the CIO to make decisions about when storage is needed and how much storage is required.

To sum it up, this storage solution combines IBM’s proven #data management leadership with proprietary #analytics from IBM Research and #IBMCloud delivery expertise, to enable IBM Storage Insights to quickly and easily lower your costs by optimizing your storage environment.

The immediate value of IBM Storage Insights is:

• Seeing how your capacity is broken down at different levels
• Viewing aggregated capacity across your entire storage environment
• Comparing storage system asset information
• Viewing capacity reclamation recommendations based on unmapped volumes
• Gaining valuable insights into storage infrastructure hierarchies

Within hours you can:

• See performance information that allows identification of hot spots and aids in troubleshooting
• See capacity valuable reclamation information for volumes that do not have any I/O

Within days and beyond you can:

• See capacity trending with rate of growth to help determine future capacity needs
• See thin provisioning trending that shows savings over traditional thick volumes
• See and and identify optimal placement of data based on performance and capacity trends

You can also go to IBM Marketplace and click Launch interactive demo. NOTE: you will need an IBM ID to log in.

Artificial intelligence meets support!

IBM is offering an early customer program for IBM Storage Insights, which brings #cognitive #AI capabilities to the support experience.

"It empowers your users and your storage administrators to have a better-functioning system. If they really do need to call IBM Support, we can easily and quickly resolve problems. With IBM Storage Insights, the artificial intelligence can help you, or can help the support guys, get you up and going rapidly, in minutes not in days," said Eric Herzog, chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels for #IBMStorage division.

Early user program

Do you manage IBM block storage systems? If so, and you want a hands-on preview of IBM’s cognitive storage management and support capabilities; consider joining the early user program. Contact your IBM representative today!

Additional information

For the very latest updates and information on IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights, see the What's new in the IBM Knowledge Center!

For continuing information on IBM Spectrum Control, IBM Storage Insights and entire IBM Spectrum Storage Suite,  or Twitter, @bobby_gratz