Originally posted by: bobby_g

On the opening day of IBM Edge 2015, Jamie Thomas, General Manager of IBM Storage and Software Defined Systems for IBM Systems, reiterated IBM's 1 billion dollar investment in storage software for hybrid cloud and announced some solutions among them a new SaaS offering, IBM Spectrum Control (TM) Storage Insights.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                We all know that the challenges are many in today's storage management environment. For example, there is rapid data growth, low utilization rates, sometimes below 50%, and error prone manual processes with home grown spreadsheets and scripts.

IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights has the ability to cut the cost of storage by 50% by:

• Taking the guess work out of managing data growth
• Monitoring tier data based on historical usage to reduce cost
• Seeing performance issues before they impact operations
• Identifying and reallocating idle storage to maximize ultization
• Managing data in context with application and department views

IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights enables you to tackle your storage management challenges giving you rapid results when you need them by:

• Typically deploying in about 30 minutes. Storage Insights requires only the downloading of the solution’s data collector to a data center server. Using the server connections to your storage environment, the collector gathers storage usage metrics and sends them over a secure channel to the IBM cloud, which provides storage analysis. "IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights deploys very quickly from the cloud, and the browser-based tool is extremely easy to use." - - Bob Oesterlin, Senior Storage Engineer, HPC Grid, Nuance Communications
• Providing insights in minutes with greater intelligence over time. The solution returns insight and recommendations quickly using metrics data that would take weeks to analyze on a spreadsheet.
• Having no on premise software to manage. Storage Insights provides information you need to know about your data and storage environment, without the upfront cost and complexity of deploying an on-premises solution.
• Providing simple pay as you go pricing to give you the flexibility with no long term commitment.
• Giving you the backing of IBM's stable and reliable cloud infrastructure. IBM is a known commodity in analytics leadership and has rich history of storage management expertise with a cloud-based delivery model.

The Storage Insights dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of the entire storage environment, with the ability to drill into efficiency-improving recommendations.

You get immediate, cross-environment visualization with Storage Insights, you can get out-of-the-box views of storage from the server, virtual machine and file system perspective. In a few easy steps, you can also see 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 opportunities to optimize performance and save money

Before Storage Insights, tools typically provided information on data center storage use only, not use by the people or applications using the data center. Now, you can get an at-a-glance view of your entire storage environment.

The time is getting very close to start optimizing your storage Infrastructure.  Stay tuned!

See more at the  IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights product page.

See this IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights video. 

Watch live sessions from IBM Edge 2015.

Get the agenda for each day.

For continuing information on Storage Insights or IBM Spectrum Control, follow me, Bob Graczyk, on Twitter, @bobby_gratz or Linkedin.