Learn about our Storage Optimization Solution:
“As enterprises implement comprehensive strategies for lowering costs and reducing the risks of unmanaged data, the ability to intelligently classify, search and manage unstructured information becomes essential.”
Enterprise Strategy Group
In a report released in March, 2007, IDC notes that the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated in 2006 was 161 exabytes (or 161 billion gigabytes). Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes.
In most companies unstructured information (the millions of files scattered across network storage devices, servers, laptops, and desktops) consumes at least 70-80% of an organization’s storage. These files are in hundreds of formats, practically invisible, and very hard to manage.
This impact is driving significant capital and operational costs tied to the acquisition and management of storage. However, costs are not limited to capital and operational costs alone. The power, cooling and space required to house and keep thousands of disk drives running adds significant cost beyond the cost of storage and the management of storage itself.
Establishing an information management strategy is a high priority for many companies as they struggle to deal with data growth. An information management strategy will include policies for what kind of information should be stored, and what service levels should be applied. Tiering storage to vary those service levels is an important part of most storage strategies but if you don’t know what information you have or value it has, it is very hard to decide what data should be placed on a particular tier.
Unstructured vs. Structured Information
The need to contain rising IT costs and drive efficiencies coupled with the availability of a variety of server and storage virtualization technologies has also led to an increasing number of consolidation projects each year. As with tiering, it is difficult to deliver a consolidation project effectively if the data to be consolidated is not well understood.
IT is also faced with backup and recovery challenges to meet business requirements. This has led companies to deploy disk-to-disk backup solutions to improve backup performance and have information online for rapid recovery. With companies now storing months-to-years of backup data online the ability to quickly find and recover files has become essential for IT staff, legal teams, and end users. It can be challenging for end users and the IT help desk alike when a critical file needs to be recovered but little is known about it.
To optimize storage, manage growth and contain costs, companies need a solution to search, classify, and act on their information.
The Kazeon Storage Optimization Solution enables IT administrators to dramatically reduce the amount of effort spent manually gathering information and instead focus on higher value activities such as tracking trends for better planning, reviewing utilization by users and groups, or attributing storage consumption to different departments for chargeback. A flexible policy engine enables organizations to move or copy files from one class of storage to another and identify what files can be deleted.
These capabilities can be applied to many business use cases, including: data consolidation, file reporting, and backup search & recovery.
Kazeon advanced file reporting capabilities enable IT to create reports about file history (creation, modification, deletions, etc), file distribution across storage tiers, and duplicate files. Default reports are provided or IT can create new reports to meet their needs. Reports can be run immediately or be scheduled to run automatically at specified times. After a report is generated, results can be viewed and saved.
A unique value that Kazeon provides is the ability to take an action from the report results screen such as tagging, archiving, or deleting files.
For each report category, IT can create a summary or detail report. A summary report provides aggregate information about all files that match the report criteria. A detail report provides metadata at the file level about each individual file that matches the report criteria.
After running reports and analyzing the results, IT can create policies to optimize its tiered storage infrastructure by defining levels of service across tiers of storage that simplify management, optimize storage utilization, and cut costs. Policies enable organizations to move or copy files from one class of storage to another and identify what files can be deleted. The policies are based on common file attributes (last time accessed, frequency of access, etc) to meet IT requirements.
Organizations can migrate entire projects or take aged, infrequently accessed files and move them to more cost effective secondary storage based on end user service level requirements. Kazeon can also help organizations identify duplicate files so they can be migrated to single instance storage or deleted completely. Advanced features such as automated load balancing and cluster support optimize performance and simplify deployment.
Kazeon’s optional SnapSearch and Recovery software provides a fast way to restore files from online backup. SnapSearch and Recovery software is tightly integrated with the suite of NetApp Snapshot™ technologies, including SnapVault® and SnapMirror® software.
Portal view showing 4 reports: non-public information, duplicate files, file size distribution, and storage utilization by document type Click to see screenshot larger
Administrator taking action and moving files contained in report results. Click to see screenshot larger
Easy-to-use web-based search interface helps IT quickly find files for rapid recovery Click to see screenshot larger
Kazeon enables companies to gain visibility into information scattered across their storage infrastructure. On the basis of this visibility, a tiered storage infrastructure can be clearly defined and deployed while aligning data on the appropriate class of storage based on business value. IT staff, legal teams, and end users also now have a fast, efficient, simple, and non-disruptive way to restore files from online backup, providing unmatched simplicity for data recovery.
Benefits of the Kazeon Storage Optimization solution include:
Gain insight necessary to build a solid information management policy
Reduce storage and backup costs through the identification of files that can be deleted or de-duplicated
Implement tiered storage based on a sound understanding of the information stored
Improve planning through trend tracking
Automate data gathering and reporting to eliminate manual processes
Deliver data consolidation projects more rapidly while improving the quality of data during the data consolidation process.
Improve IT Helpdesk response time to meet service level requirements
Kazeon provides the technology and solution for defining levels of service across tiers of storage that simplify management, optimize storage utilization, and cut costs.
“The award-winning Kazeon Information Server delivers scalable, automated, feature-rich file reporting and migration capabilities enabling organizations to optimize and more cost-effectively manage their information”
Enterprise Strategy Group
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