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Everyone in IT is familiar with the question: Is it best to move storage to the public cloud or on-premises? Or is a combination of both better?
On-premises and public cloud storage are radically different from each other, especially when it comes to storage reporting and monitoring. For storage and infrastructure professionals, there are trade-offs to both. Each presents different capabilities and configurations, demanding different reporting emphases.
On the other hand, mixing storage environments can provide the best of both worlds, a competitive advantage thanks to enhanced versatility. But it can also come with the unintended complexities of managing these two contrasting infrastructure models, such as relying on multiple tools to access reporting – hampering visibility and leaving you vulnerable to costly mistakes.
There are significant observability differences between public cloud and on-premises storage models. And hybrid models blend these differences, necessitating a greater level of analysis and reporting.
What are these differences, and how do they impact data collection and monitoring? Let’s look at all three models, their storage reporting challenges, and storage resource management solutions for each.
On-Premises Reporting
An on-premises (on-prem) storage environment provides your organization with total control but also total responsibility. Enterprises that choose to deploy on-prem storage are wholly responsible for procuring, configuring, and maintaining server hardware. For that reason, IT leaders at these organizations are primarily interested in reporting that highlights performance or utilization challenges.
Additionally, forecasting becomes substantially more important in order to negotiate new storage purchases while avoiding any unnecessary, reactive purchases. Once the storage is purchased, there aren’t additional usage costs. But the high cost of purchasing hardware means that IT leaders need to pay particular attention to both capacity planning and performance within the on-prem storage environments.
Unlike in the public cloud, however, over-provisioning is common in on-prem environments. This is because it is expensive to suddenly run short of resources and need new storage hardware without warning. Over-provisioning provides an insurance policy of sorts without incurring new costs and is not a priority for monitoring.
Visual One Intelligence excels in these focus areas, making sure that on-premises storage environments are configured properly. By bringing enterprise and array-level performance and utilization data onto a single pane of glass, Visual One simplifies on-prem storage reporting no matter how many vendors your environment is comprised of.
Public Cloud Reporting
One of the biggest advantages of the flexible nature of cloud technology is that companies only pay for what they use. To maximize this advantage, cloud users will want to avoid over-provisioning.
Cloud storage billing is complex and typically based on several components, including data storage, network storage, operations usage, retrieval, and early deletion fees. In addition, cloud costs for both storage and storage activity may also vary depending on the storage tier, which means if you pick the workload, your costs may be significantly higher than anticipated.
The kind of reporting that concerns IT leaders in a cloud environment differs from an on-prem environment. Reporting that might not be important or interesting on-prem, such as over-provisioning, becomes much more essential when working with cloud storage.
While over-provisioning has no extra costs associated with it when done on-prem, it can become very expensive when it happens in the cloud. Companies are responsible for paying for all the data allocated to them, and that puts a higher emphasis on finding unused or underused resources. No one wants to waste storage they pay for.
On the other hand, some of the data that is important in on-prem environments is less important in the cloud. Public cloud providers such as Azure and AWS guarantee storage performance. Instead of focusing on performance, IT leaders are looking for reporting and analysis that will help with right-sizing, capacity planning, and proactive decision-making.
Visual One Intelligence helps IT leaders simplify cloud capacity monitoring. In just a few clicks (or less), Visual One displays storage allocations, available usable storage, and fragmented / hidden storage.
Consolidated Reporting Across Storage Environments
Although there are many differences between on-premises and cloud storage environments, one constant will always be a need for consistent reporting and data-driven insights to uncover opportunities for operational efficiencies, cost savings, and infrastructure planning.
Doing that, however, often requires separate storage resource management tools to handle different monitoring needs.
Visual One Intelligence is different. Visual One understands both on-premises and cloud storage and can help IT leaders pull them together, providing a single pane of glass across the enterprise.
With quick and easy reporting that addresses both on-prem priorities (like performance and utilization) and cloud priorities (like storage allocations), Visual One offers IT leaders complete visibility into what’s going on across hybrid storage environments.
Best of all, this is done without the need for multiple tools or burdening teams with learning new systems or protocols. Everything is immediately available on a 24/7 client dashboard and delivered once weekly in a personalized email.
Whether your storage is entirely on-premises, all in the public cloud, or mixed in a hybrid environment, don’t get weighed down in complex analysis and reporting.
Visual One Intelligence can help you get the most out of your storage environment – without complexity. Schedule a demo to talk to a Visual One expert and gain the transparency and data confidence your team needs.
Key Takeaways
- Because of their different structures, blending on-premises storage with public cloud-hosted storage requires a greater level of reporting.
- IT leaders need to see storage trends across their whole environment, especially in heterogeneous storage environments.
- Visual One understands both on-premises and cloud storage, and we can help IT leaders pull them together, providing a single pane of glass across the enterprise.
