NetApp made the claim while announcing the availability of its new SANscreen 5.0, an addition to its product suite that it says 'provides customers with increased storage management capabilities for improved cost savings and data center efficiencies'.
"The NetApp SANscreen product suite empowers customers by providing them with the tools needed to better manage their storage environment, resulting in reduced costs and increased data center efficiencies," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp.
"With SANscreen 5.0, customers receive even more detailed insight into their storage environments, allowing them to improve their business operations."
Enterprise Storage Group analyst Bob Laliberte, said that, with today's economy, enterprise customers needed to find ways to increase utilisation of their existing IT infrastructure and to lower their costs.
End-to-end solution
"One way that IT staffs can accomplish this is by implementing an end-to-end storage management solution that provides full visibility and flexible capacity management capabilities," Laliberte said.
"Investing in these technologies can provide an almost immediate return on investment for storage, network, and server assets, plus it enables customers to align their storage services with application requirements."
NetApp maintains that it's SANscreen software delivered data center efficiencies to storage by proactively aligning storage resources with application requirements.
By enabling real-time, multivendor, multiprotocol service-level views of the storage environment, the firm claims that SANscreen allowed customers to manage storage as a true end-to-end IT service. Since the service-level information that is delivered via SANscreen can be leveraged by storage and nonstorage teams, NetApp says customers can effectively integrate storage into the entire IT service delivery chain, resulting in increased efficiencies and reduced costs.
New capacity management
The firm maintains that SANscreen 5.0 'strengthens the existing product suite's capabilities by providing several new capacity management features, including a new data warehouse and an embedded business intelligence engine, which provide global infrastructure visibility and flexible reporting capabilities'. It says that this enables customers to run, modify, or create robust capacity management, tiering, and cost-awareness/chargeback reports, providing IT with the necessary information to make the right business and capacity decisions.
Also included in SANscreen 5.0 is expanded multivendor performance support, iSCSI protocol support, and a VMware vCenter plug-in, providing customers with greater visibility into their storage environment.