This post is also available in: Italian

CloudPhysics announce with a blog post (Who’s minding your storage zoo? Try CloudPhysics new storage analytics) a new functions of their product: the storage analytics aim to provide data about your storage (and datastore) environment in order to resolve (or avoid) common issues, especially the storage capacity and performance aspects.

Their SaaS solution is absolutely interesting and I’ve write about them in my #VFD3 report, but what is really interesting, like in this case, is that they are using customer’s feedbacks to improve the product and make their day-to-day virtual data center operations smoother.

Storage capacity

There are many fast-and-easy paths to storage waste in a virtualized datacenter. But the path to storage reclamation is typically slow and complicated.

VM sprawl does not help: it takes just seconds to spin up a new VM, but figuring out if and when it needs to be deleted takes hours, if not weeks. You can more easily reclaim CPU and memory resources by powering off the VMs, but powered off VMs still take up disk space. Over time, you may forget about them. That’s just one example of space waste – there are many more.

CloudPhysics is specifically addressing storage-induced capacity problems by providing unique, powerful insights into where and how your storage space is being consumed along with specific recommendations on how to reclaim the space. They have been working hard to develop the algorithms that solve this problem, while making all that complexity transparent to users.

Storage performance

There’s a strong relationship between storage waste and storage performance. Why? Many virtualization users simply overprovision the number of spindles, read/write cache, flash storage etc. to avoid the pain of troubleshooting storage performance issues. After all who wants to spend hours and hours of time combing through performance charts to understand correlations and do root cause analysis? Nobody does – but we have figured out how to leverage big data analytics to do it for you.

The new datastore contention analytics tells you when and where you are experiencing contention, and automatically identifies which VMs in your datastore are performance culprits (and which are victims). You can now solve performance issues literally in few clicks – which is a lot quicker and more efficient than overprovisioning your storage.

Obviously there’s a lot more to discover in our new Storage Analytics, so be sure to check for more blogs on CloudPhysics web site.

Or simple, check it out for yourself. Just click here to sign up here for your 30-day free trial.

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.