In the period up to 2011, IDC estimated 1,150 Billion Gigabytes of storage capacity would be shipped to businesses worldwide, helping them to cope with an incredible 10x growth in the digital universe over the same period.

As well as having to support these ever increasing data volumes, every organisation faces a growing number of Data Protection challenges including:

To support the constant growth in data volumes and introduction of new storage technologies, every organisation faces the challenge of data migration in some form or another. Typical examples include:

• Data migration from one type of storage array to another
• Data migration from one vendor array to another
• Deployment of a new data centre over metropolitan or geographical distance
• Whatever the requirement, physical data migration can be both time consuming and high risk, as any form of data loss or extended outage can be catastrophic to a business.

The move to Server Virtualisation provides a whole range of benefits to organisations, however, by its very nature (which is exploiting the management of mixed workloads on shared physical infrastructure) Virtualisation re-introduces the requirements for disciplines that were traditionally associated with the mainframe world such as:

• Workload profiling
• Defining Performance Objectives
• Managing resource contention across multiple operating system images and application instances
• Capacity Planning

The file analysis service is designed to quickly analyse file systems and provide detailed reports on disk usage. Armed with this information the customer can maximise their investment in storage and build an informed strategy for future storage purchases. The information can be used to maximise storage investment through de-duplication and archiving thus improving backup throughput and disaster recovery planning.

GCH provides vendor independent SAN consultancy services for both enterprise and virtualised SAN environments. Using industry leading SAN Monitoring and Analysis tools, GCH provide an unprecedented scope of diagnosis and prevention capabilities for heterogeneous SAN infrastructures.

Benefits:

GCH provides vendor independent SAN Health Checks for both enterprise and virtualised SAN environments. Regular Health Checks provide statistical measurements of SAN performance and storage utilisation.

Health Checks can be provided as one off service or on a regular basis such as quarterly or six monthly.

Benefits:

----- Ensure SAN Performance meets agreed SLA targets
----- Report Generation that can drill down to LUN level
----- Prevent SAN problems or their reoccurrence through expert monitoring
----- Benchmark SAN performance

The SAN Health Check (SAN Audit) makes it possible to ensure that SAN transaction paths supporting key applications are

----- operating optimally
----- free of error
----- have the capacity to fully support growing SAN needs

The procedure for the SAN Health Check can be seen below: