NetApp Inc. OnCommand Insight Balance

NetApp OnCommand Insight Balance is the victor in the storage management tools category in Storage magazine's/SearchStorage.com's 2011 Products of the Year competition. Read our best data storage products of 2011 guide to get a list of all the winners.

NetApp OnCommand Insight Balance has what an architect would call “good bones” -- its heritage is the two-time gold winner BalancePoint that NetApp picked up with its acquisition of Akorri Networks Inc. Insight Balance collects performance-related data all the way from an application to the storage it uses. With the data it collects, the app models application and component behaviors, and analyzes the app-to-storage route for potential performance bottlenecks. Insight Balance also works within virtualized environments -- no small feat given the difficulties of keeping track of dynamic virtual machine environments.

NetApp has beefed up OnCommand Insight Balance’s interfaces and reporting capabilities. Its Health Panels provide a quick look at how performance and capacity are faring, and a Predictor and Abnormality Index sounds an alarm when it senses that storage or an app is acting up.

One judge noted Insight Balance’s “actionable management, deeper storage analysis, deeper virtual machine (VM) performance analysis and app contention analysis.”

NetApp quotes a $12,000 base price for NetApp OnCommand Insight Balance supporting a heterogeneous storage environment. For NetApp systems, “value pricing” begins at $1,400 per controller.

Find out the other winners in the Storage Management Tools category.