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Prevent Storage Crises: Harness the Power of Storage Insights

  • 1.  Prevent Storage Crises: Harness the Power of Storage Insights

    Posted Sun July 21, 2024 01:29 AM

    What is Storage Insights ?

    IBM Storage Insights is a SaaS product that provides comprehensive tracking of inventory, health, and performance across all IBM Block and multi-vendor controllers (including EMC, Hitachi, and others), as well as file controllers, switches, and hosts-all within a single, unified dashboard.

    At IBM, we adhere to the "Customer First" design principle, ensuring that our features meet our customers' most critical requirements in the best possible way. A top priority for any business is to maintain uninterrupted production and continuity, and IBM Storage Insights plays a crucial role in achieving this for our customers.

    As business needs evolve, so do storage demands. Storage Insights keeps our customers informed about these dynamically changing requirements, providing various functions designed to ensure continuous business storage continuity. Here they are:

    1) Pre-Defined Alerts in Storage Insights

    Storage Insights offers a comprehensive set of pre-defined alerts, including critical and warning alerts for capacity utilization. These alerts help storage administrators proactively manage and maintain optimal storage performance.

    • Warning Alert to Storage Admin: Triggered at 75% utilization.
    • Critical Alert to Storage Admin: Triggered at 80% utilization.

    These alerts are also sent via email to storage administrators, ensuring a quick response and timely action to prevent potential issues before they impact business operations.

    IBM Storage Insights Pro showing pre-defined alerts on Capacity threshold breach

    The new Storage Insights dashboard features an intuitive one-click alerts view for storage administrators. Systems with critical alerts are automatically sorted to the top, enabling administrators to quickly identify and prioritize urgent issues.

    Overview Dashboard Page of Storage Insights to showcase Alerts to Storage Admin.

    The comprehensive set of alerts in Storage Insights helps our customers maintain production uptime. By enabling proactive actions, these alerts provide daily benefits, ensuring smooth and uninterrupted operations.

    2) Capacity Threshold Prediction with the "Advisory" Function

    Storage Insights includes an "Advisory" function for capacity threshold prediction. This feature provides block controller array-based advisory actions, enabling storage administrators to effectively plan upgrades and other necessary actions.

    Storage Insights Advisory for Pool based capacity exceed prediction

    3) AI-Driven Capacity Usage Forecasting

    One of the most valuable features of Storage Insights' AIOps capabilities is AI-driven capacity usage forecasting. This function enables storage administrators to predict future capacity needs based on historical usage patterns and anticipated growth.

    In addition to capacity forecasting, Storage Insights offers tunable parameters such as written capacity and compression values, allowing for more precise forecasts.

    We employ advanced AI models to train our dataset, selecting the most accurate models to provide reliable capacity predictions. The forecasting results are visually presented in intuitive graphs, which are also accessible on our new Overview dashboards.

    Storage administrators can utilize the reporting function to generate detailed reports that include these graphs, aiding in strategic planning for capacity upgrades.

    AI based Capacity Forecasting function by Storage Insights

    4) Proactive Support Team

    Embracing the "Customer First" design principle, Storage Insights takes a proactive approach to prevent "Out of Capacity" or "Out of Space" situations, ensuring business continuity is upheld.

    Our dedicated support team leverages Storage Insights to monitor and anticipate potential issues, actively reaching out to customers to assist with optimizing, migrating, or upgrading their storage solutions. This proactive support helps ensure that storage requirements are effectively managed and future challenges are addressed before they impact operations.

    5) Sales and Tech-Sales Enablement Tool

    Storage Insights offers a robust interface designed for Partners and Sales enablement teams, providing early alerts on Capacity and Warranty expirations through our subscription service.

    This proactive alert system supports sales teams in Lead generation by enabling timely outreach to customers. It facilitates advanced planning for upgrades and hardware refreshes, ensuring that customers are well-prepared and informed about their storage needs.

    Storage Insights Page to showcase Subscription of Capacity and Warranty Alerts.

    All users with Spectrum Control and Expert Care Premium licenses are automatically entitled to Storage Insights Pro access.

    For those interested in exploring Storage Insights Pro, a demo instance is available at https://demo.insights.ibm.com. Feel free to try it out and experience the full range of features firsthand.

    References:

    IBM Storage Insights documentation - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-insights

    Storage Insights Product Page - https://www.ibm.com/products/storage-insights

    Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@StorageGuru

    The Author is Quality Architect specializing in Storage Insights and Spectrum Control, with nearly 20 years of experience in the storage industry.



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    AKSHAT MITHAL
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