Centera ECS Reporting as a Service
CRaaS SolutionsCAS Reporting as a Service (CRaaS©) has been designed for Organisations that need to have confidence in the archive and ensure data are aligned to the current policies across their Centera or ECS* estate. This is delivered through improved visibility and reporting, but without the need for dedicated resources or skills.
The Reporting service will analyse the data you are storing and help you to understand whether the information is compliant, and what content could – and even should – be removed. Although available as a one-time service, regular reporting provides a detailed, accurate picture of your archived environment to keep you in control of your corporate information assets. With the report providing a firm foundation of up-to-date knowledge of your archived data, we can help you to consider your options for improving compliance and achieving cost-efficient management.
Many customers use this service when considering migrating off Centera/ECS to understand what data they have on their CAS device, whether it is needed, is it in line with the application nd whether all the data needs to be migrated, potentially reducing target capacity requirements and migration times.
By understanding the data within your CAS environment in more detail, informed decisions can be made about what to do moving forward, some typical options our customer have are:
How We Gather The Data
At the core of the service we use four modules to ingest and gather the data, providing for you:
Reciprocal Reporting Modules Retention
Conforming absolutely and without fail – to both internal and external regulations can be the key to building a trusted relationship with your customers. It can also be the key to staying out of legal difficulty. Are your applications and staff absolutely conforming?
Retention reports on all data that has passed its retention period but that has not been deleted. In addition, Reciprocal also reports on data that has not passed its retention period but that has been deleted. These reports enable you to judge how your applications and staff are performing against your retention policies.
Compare
In a world where data can be the key to business success, companies need to be 100% sure their data are fully protected as expected in case of site disasters.
Compare helps you ensure both the consistency and completeness of a replicated environment or between a cluster and an application: Cluster Compare
In a replicated environment, Reciprocal finds inconsistencies between the replicated clusters; are the C-Clips and blobs on cluster A also on cluster B? Cluster compare also shows how long the clusters have been out of sync, enabling you to identify a specific time-based event that caused the situation. If we find consistency issues, you can create a clip list that can be used with standard Centera functionality to bring both clusters back in sync.
Cluster Application Consistency
In cases where the application can export a list of content addresses of the files it has written to the Centera (such as with Dell EMC Documentum), we can report on the data that have been written/deleted by the application but have not been written/deleted by the Centera (and vice versa). In certain cases, we may be able to create a clip list to aid in bringing the cluster/application back in sync.
Capacity Trending
When budgets are tight, knowing exactly what capacity you use and what capacity you will need are essential to maximising your assets.
Trending reports on the amount of data stored on the Centera over time. You can see the trend of data growth, identify which applications are writing the most data, and understand the size and type of data being stored.
Trending can help to plan for new capacity increases, in preparation for migration to a new Centera or another storage platform, and to choose the most efficient storage strategy.
Chargeback
Through its object-based storage approach, Centera enables companies to store amounts of data from many departments and users without the management overhead. But companies may still want to charge each department or user for the actual usage of the Centera.
Using Chargeback allows the reporting to create capacity usage reports based on department, project, application or any other field within the Centera metadata. With Chargeback you can map dynamically any metadata to any chargeback entity. Even if you haven’t identified charging entities in advance, you can still create chargeback reports from other kinds of identifiers contained in the metadata. As organisational changes occur, you can simply and quickly re-map the reports allowing you to recreate and maintain chargeback entities in a changing environment.
Once reports are created, you can export them or extract them through the API for use in external applications.
Reporting Service
CRaaS© includes the infrastructure and licenced modules to deliver the following capability based on quarterly reports. The full details of the reports and services would be discussed in a full scoping workshop but covers;
Length of Contract
The service can be taken as a one-off for customers looking to migrate off CAS.
For customers looking to stay on CAS, the length of the Contract can be based on one, two or three years and align with your current Centera solution. This allows for well-planned Centera consolidations, high speed migrations as well as allowing your support levels to match End of Life and End of Service Life Nodes.
Annual Reporting Service Deliverables including Maintenance and Support:
