Destination Unknown

2021 is going to be a key year for many businesses attempting to recover from the tremendous impact COVID-19, political shifts and more had last year.
I don’t think many of us will look back on 2020 fondly and hopefully humanity can rise up and work together to get us back to normality.... or even better than before.

One of the key realisations of 2020 was that businesses that quickly shift to accommodate unexpected changes can continue to operate and even excel despite the unexpected and often challenging circumstances.

A lot of organisations had previously feared a negative productivity impact if most, or all of their employees worked from home, and had therefore never tried it. However, for most organisations this shift proved to be a success, with employees not spending unnecessary time, money and energy travelling. This has often resulted in employees having more time to focus in the comfort of their own home and for many a better work/life balance.
I still do miss a trip out at the moment though just for the comradery, face-to-face interaction and knowledge sharing.

Looking back on 2020, we had a very successful year here at Catalogic. One of the key reasons for this success is that we have the ability to quickly pivot and work in an agile manner, meaning we discuss customers’ requirements and develop solutions to deliver against them – solutions which are often specific and complex.

A key talking point many customers came to us with in 2020 was around how we can improve data visibility, management and orchestration.

Sound interesting? Let me talk to you about how we can enable you to have visibility in your environment via Catalogic ECX.

In every active environment data continues to grow. Data growth often causes a major data headache for IT administrators. The reason for this is growth results in more and more information and often it gets to a point where understanding what data sits where is a nearly impossible task.

Step forward Catalogic ECX.

With Catalogic ECX we can provide data visibility, management control and orchestration of NetApp, IBM Storage, Pure Storage, HPE Nimble, VMware vSphere, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP HANA and InterSystems Caché environments.

Because we inventorise all key data within these types of storage, hypervisors, virtual machines, physical servers and databases we can provide the ability for IT administrators to better navigate their environment. Think of it like a Sat-Nav that tells us where we would like to go (ECX tells us what resources you want to see to show the associated applications, servers and storage)

*Yes that is my sat nav!!

To put this into context a large NetApp customer with over 300 filers, billions of objects and thousands of snapshots, vaults and mirrors came to us with their data headache.
They simply wanted the ability to map their VM’ storage all the way back to a source storage volume and show the associated Snapshots, SnapMirrors and SnapVaults. They couldn’t find a way to easily do this and had chewed through a lot of paracetamol already! After understanding their requirement we quickly went away and built the customer a custom VM and Storage mapping report in Catalogic ECX.

Below is an example of the VM and Storage Mapping report showing:

• Virtual machine > Disk(s) (VMDK(s)) > Datastore(s) path containing VMDK(s) > Netapp LUN(s) providing datastore(s) > Netapp Volume(s) providing LUN(s) > Is NetApp SnapMirror in use and replication destination > Is NetApp SnapVault in use and vault destination.

All this data is being updated daily via inventories, the report can be scheduled to run and also called via the ECX API.

Providing this information resulted in a vastly lower management overhead in terms of clear visibility, ability to find data, recover data and better manage the storage, virtual and data protection environments.  Like a Sat-Nav for their environment!

If you’re interested in setting your 2021 destination to enhanced data visibility, management and orchestration please get in contact me via wbush@catalogicsoftware.com

Or you can request a demo or trial of any of our solutions here

Thanks for reading and stay safe, I look forward to a beverage with you all in the near future 🍻