Cloud firm CloudPhysics has released a storage analytics tool for VMware’s vSphere environment, claiming it cuts trouble-shooting time down by a factor of 10.
The solution is aimed at sysadmins struggling with maintaining virtualised storage in their private clouds, and uses metadata and trends from thousands of data centres to flag up potential issues before they happen.
CEO John Blumenthal said storage is still an "extremely painful resource" when virtualised, and boasted that the new product, Storage Analytics, would give virtual data centres "Google-like operational efficiency".
He said: "Storage continues to be an extremely painful resource to manage in virtual environments, and the tools available today fail to provide the visibility, much less the intelligence, to help IT fully understand and easily control its most expensive data centre resource.
"With our new release, we’ve doubled down on storage, providing storage-focused analytics that cut through the layers of complexity and provide answers IT teams need to prevent storage-induced downtime, optimise capacity and keep their virtual data centres healthy."
IT operators can also use the tool to create custom storage analytics and reporting to enable root cause analysis and ongoing management, as well as carry out thorough health checks on datastores to prevent waste.
CloudPhysics claimed that storage-related downtime accounts for 58% of all data centre downtime, an analyst warned that IT departments unfairly get the flak for storage-related problems in businesses’ private clouds.
Bernd Harzog, analyst at The Virtualization Practice, said: "IT Ops teams managing virtualised infrastructures face a continuous onslaught of allegations that something is slow and that it is their fault.
"It turns out in more than 90% of the cases where the infrastructure actually is at fault, the culprit is storage."
CloudPhysics aims to use a recently raised $15m round of funding to push the product and strengthen its portfolio of cloud tools.
