American Megatrends Releases StorTrends iDATA IT Infrastructure Assessment Tool Identifies Performance, Capacity and Throughput Needs to Proactively Make Informed Storage Decisions

NORCROSS, GA--(Marketwired - Apr 8, 2014) -  American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) today announced the release of the StorTrends iDATA (Intelligent Data Analysis Tracking Application), a free software tool designed to provide an accurate assessment of IT infrastructure performance, capacity and throughput requirements. By measuring all of the necessary components of an IT infrastructure, the StorTrends iDATA tool can assess pain points in an environment before they become disruptive and provide the details needed to make informed storage decisions.

"Our research finds that one of the key reasons storage installations fail is that IT administrators lack the accurate information needed to properly provision the performance, capacity and throughput the environment requires to deliver optimum storage efficiency," said Deni Connor, founding analyst, SSG-NOW. "Are you considering SSDs in an All-Flash or Hybrid Storage Array? How much hot data or active data do you have within your existing environment and how much SSD or Flash space do you need? Don't worry, most IT Directors and IT Admins don't know the answer either. The StorTrends iDATA tool is a free and powerful way to answer this question and many more. It provides the key details organizations need, such as the amount of IOPS a SAN requires, the environment's expected growth rate, and the amount of hot data or active data -- to more accurately achieve your storage goals and eliminate the need to overprovision costly storage resources."

The StorTrends iDATA software tool runs, non-intrusively, in the background of an existing IT environment for seven days. Once complete, the tool produces an analysis output file to generate a report that provides important metrics including capacity utilization, IOPS usage, reads versus writes for volumes, network bandwidth performance, server statistics and application information. The resulting metrics can be used to accurately develop a short and long-term storage strategy with heightened confidence.

StorTrends iData Identifies Customers IT Infrastructure Problems for Proactive Resolution and Planning
Restaurant Technology, Inc. (RTI), a technology leader in restaurant food and labor costs savings, StorTrends iDATA provided the valuable insight it needed to optimize its storage capacity and performance planning. "The StorTrends iDATA tool quickly pointed out the IOPS, active data and throughput requirements within our infrastructure to be better prepared to get the most of our storage investment," said Phil Blakely, Network & Systems Administrator at Restaurant Technology, Inc. "As a result we are planning to implement another StorTrends SAN Array knowing that we can maximize its performance and leverage the exact amount of flash capacity we need to optimize our applications and support our customers. It removed the guesswork and gave use the confidence that we needed to select the proper SAN configuration for our requirements today and for the future."

• Active Data Identification/Hot Data - the StorTrends iDATA tool can identify the active or hot data within a customer's environment. This allows the customer to make an educated purchase of higher performance drives, such as SSD/Flash or SAS. This allows the customer to avoid costly over provisioning (which is what most vendors push to achieve higher revenue marks) and under provisioning (which would starve applications and create bottlenecks in the new environment). The StorTrends iDATA tool allows a customer to be very comfortable in making future purchases and changes to his or her environment by knowing their active or hot data versus their inactive or cold data. This is a main pointer for the customer to determine if their applications require All-Flash, Hybrid (mixture of SSD & HDD) or all Spinning Disk.

• VDI Requirements/ User and App Performance - many VDI implementations fail due to underestimating the profiles of all the users within the VDI infrastructure. The StorTrends iDATA tool can be ran on users existing setups and will identify the key metrics to identify the user profile as a Light, Medium, Power Standard or Power Heavy user. This allows for the proper selection of server compute and storage (i.e. physical CPU, virtual cores CPU, memory, SSD capacity and quantity) to ensure the required performance. Without accurately measuring the existing user profiles, customers have no real insight and this can create serious issues in performance for the users and applications in the VDI environment. The StorTrends iDATA tool measures the exact usage of existing users and outputs the analysis so exact measurements can be used to pinpoint and provision the exact amount of needed server compute and storage resources -- avoiding over provisioning and under provisioning which is often costly and detrimental to VDI setups.

• Capacity Growth /Resource Requirements - Customers that are running existing data storage and that are looking to refresh their existing unit are primary candidates to run the StorTrends iDATA tool. The StorTrends iDATA tool can identify the performance in regards to reads versus writes, the total IOPS and the throughput. This allows the customer to identify the type and quantity of disk required for their refresh. The StorTrends iDATA tool monitors the average daily growth of the data while monitoring the customer's environment. This allows for intelligent growth planning to ensure the replacement data storage can scale properly with the company's actual data growth requirements. 

Key metrics evaluated by StorTrends iDATA include, but are not limited to:

• Capacity Usage & Growth
• IOPS (Read versus Writes)
• Network Utilization
• Hot/Active and Cold/Inactive data
• System Performance
• Application Loads
• Latency (ms)
• Queue Depth
• IO Size

"When it comes to storage infrastructure, the unknowns can have a serious impact on your environment's success," said Justin Bagby, Director of StorTrends Division at American Megatrends. "With the StorTrends iDATA software tool, we are eliminating those unknown factors that can cause critical storage headaches down the road. In one week, organizations can have the clear view of their infrastructure demands and make more informed decisions that will deliver long-term value in the areas of operational performance, availability and agility. This allows the organization to make precise purchasing and upgrade decisions for all data storage types such as All-Flash Storage, Hybrid Storage or Spinning Disk Storage."

To download the free StorTrends iDATA software tool, please visit: StorTrends iDATA

To learn more about StorTrends storage products visit: http://stortrends.com/products/stortrends-overview/

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About StorTrends
StorTrends® from American Megatrends is Performance Storage with Proven Value. StorTrends SAN and NAS storage appliances are installed worldwide and trusted by companies and institutions in a wide range of industries including education, energy, finance, state & local government, healthcare, manufacturing, marketing, retail, R&D and many more. StorTrends meets the challenges and demands of today's business environments by offering a wide variety of solutions from All-Flash Storage, Hybrid Storage to Spinning Disk Solutions. StorTrends is backed by 1,100+ Customer Installations, 100+ Storage Patents and nearly 30 Years of IT Leadership from a company that millions or people trust on a daily basis, American Megatrends, Inc.

StorTrends is a registered trademark of American Megatrends. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.