Frequently Asked Questions

Using agentless data collectors, Visual Storage Intelligence® collects data from all physical, virtual, and cloud storage devices. Visual Storage Intelligence® then transfers the data to a secure private cloud, where it is sorted and processed. Data is then made accessible to clients through the 24/7 client dashboard, downloadable reports, and regular email updates.

No! Although our solution was originally developed to solve specific storage challenges, we are a single-pane-of-glass hybrid platform solution providing optimization and monitoring across cloud, VMware, hyperconverged, edge, and beyond.

Visual Storage Intelligence® is designed for storage & infrastructure administrators, architects, engineers, and directors – as well as IT executives – and anyone else working with large enterprise storage infrastructures (usually 1 PB of storage or more).

Visual Storage Intelligence® is also a great fit for MSPs who are looking for simplified ways to manage their clients’ environments.

See for yourself how we can help make your job easier!

Most likely, yes! We work through Omnia Partners to contract with eligible state, government, and education organizations.

Visit Omnia Partners’ website or contact us to learn more.

No, our tool is designed to integrate data reporting for all the devices in hybrid-platform and mixed-vendor storage environments by reporting all compute, cloud, hyperconverged, edge, and other storage data on a single pane of glass.

For a list of all our cloud, compute, hyperconverged, and VMware compatibility, click here.

Homegrown Tools
These have a lot of customization abilities, but they require a ton of time and effort to manually maintain. Plus, if the person who built or manages the tool leaves the company, a lot of training and knowledge will be required to continue leveraging it. With Visual Storage Intelligence®, we handle all of the maintenance and development – and you won’t need a dedicated person on staff to “make the tool work.”

Native Vendor Tools
With Visual Storage Intelligence®, you’ll never have to log into separate tools just to see data and insights from different devices you own. We display everything together on a single pane of glass, automating reports and analytics that teams often have to build spreadsheets to compile when using native vendor tools (like Active IQ, Pure ONE, HPE Insights etc.) in a multi-vendor storage environment. On top of that, we display your compute and cloud information as well – we go way beyond on-prem devices.

Storage-Vendor SRMs
Unlike NetApp (OCI), Dell EMC (SRM), and similar vendor tool distributors, Visual Storage Intelligence® does not manufacture or design storage devices – meaning we have no bias towards one set of devices, and no motive to omit certain data about your devices for sales purposes. Plus, Visual Storage Intelligence® is often less than half the maintenance renewal costs of most storage management tools.

Independent SRMs
Other vendor-agnostic tools like Virtana, Aptare, SolarWinds SRM, and similar tools can be complex – with too many bells and whistles that, at the end of the day, most people don’t really use. Additionally, some of these SRMs are simply add-on products in a much larger company that is focused on other projects. Visual Storage Intelligence® focuses on what’s important to you now. In fact, we often add custom views, reports, or device support within less than a month when clients request them. Our white-glove service is one of our driving principles as a company. Plus, Visual Storage Intelligence® is often less than half the maintenance renewal costs of most storage management tools.

SANnav is an ideal tool for specifically for setting up large quantities of new SAN switches, defining custom switch policies, and deploying architecture templates across multiple switch environments.

However, this niche doesn’t apply to most IT Infrastructures.

Visual Storage Intelligence includes robust switch reporting and insights in addition to comprehensive hybrid-platform analytics that don’t require any additional resources or configuration in the end-user environment.

Like SANnav, Visual Storage Intelligence:

• Shows host / switch / storage topology
• Discovers new switches
• Tracks configurations
• Shows health summaries and error details

Unlike SANnav, Visual Storage Intelligence:

• Shows global topology
• Automatically lists host connections
• Does switch capacity planning
• Shows end of life / support calendars
• Does switch reporting on top of storage, host, compute, and cloud analytics
• Does not require user backups or recovery plans

For a more detailed comparison, including technical requirements and pricing differences, click here.

Setting up Visual Storage Intelligence® is simple and usually takes 1-2 hours. All that is needed is a data collection set up call with a Visual Storage Intelligence® consultant, plus CLI or REST API access for data collection purposes.

That means you can set up a 30-day free trial in less than a day!

No, the data that Visual Storage Intelligence® collects is configuration data and does not include sensitive or proprietary information.

The Visual Storage Intelligence® application takes 1-2 minutes per array to run commands. (Saving text files take another 1-2 minutes). Once you upload your text files to Visual Storage Intelligence online, the reports are created in minutes! With minimum 99% uptime, you can rely on us when you need us.

No. Because Visual Storage Intelligence is only collecting data from your configuration files, your data applications will not experience any performance impact.

All data is collected through commands and scripts generally available on all platforms to run on your storage arrays. There are no software, agents, or appliances installed.

Please visit our Supported Storage Products page or contact us to tell us about your unique environment.

Supported browsers include:

• IE9 or greater
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari

Although we don’t make any guarantees, we’ve seen that 80% of the time our clients reclaim anywhere from 5-20% of their storage space by using Visual Storage Intelligence®. In large environments, this could mean a significant amount of time and money saved.

No, Visual Storage Intelligence® helps you better understand your storage environment so you can be more confident when presenting proposals, suggestions and/or recommendations to your management. Furthermore, it gives you the ability to determine where there could be room for improvement.

Storage needs have become so demanding it can feel impossible to keep up with the growth. As one client once told us, “My boss expects me to do 10% more with 10% less budget, every year – forever!”

Visual Storage Intelligence® helps you visualize your storage so you have better control over growth, management, and performance.

Capacity Planning as a Service combines the actionable reporting of Visual Storage Intelligence personal consulting from a capacity planning expert. The result is insights and recommendations to give you full control of your capacity and performance management.

With CPaaS, you can take the responsibility of data collection, reporting, and analysis off your own shoulders. Just leave it to us! One of our expert consultants will collect all the data and reports you need and provide analysis year-round, giving you a front-row seat to your storage growth and performance.

With Capacity Planning as a Service, you’ll receive:

• data collection and analysis from a dedicated expert consultant
• monthly calls and reviews
• quarterly enterprise capacity planning reports
• purchasing recommendations
• workload placement recommendations
• capacity and performance forecasting models
• data migration cost-savings analysis
• and more.
  

Get started today!

Yes; you can subscribe to Capacity Planning as a Service on a stand-alone basis, or you can easily pair it with our reporting tool for maximum impact. A standard Visual Storage Intelligence® reporting tool subscription does not automatically include Capacity Planning as a Service.