By utilizing alerts, trends, reporting. Really anything you can think of, as this has all the data, so what do you wish to do with it.

One of the best products I have used so far is CA Vantage because of the stuff that we were able to find out. I've always laughed at my bosses or management, when they always want cutesy charts, stuff like that, because to me it's not about that. If there is a problem, I work on it and move on.

But I drank the Kool-Aid and I was able to, using those same charts that they asked for, see a picture of where I am wasting resources. Whether it was data allocation or HSM failures and all this stuff. I get all these reports on a daily basis at the click of a button, and I can go ahead and fix those issues. The good thing about this is you can share this with your coworkers, your group.

My group is made up of six people. All 6 people can look at the same screen and and they are all looking at the same thing and because we're all storage management and we have the same mentality. We know what needs to be done to fix those errors.

As a storage administrator, it has helped me to control my storage capacity and keep it clean in terms of both data and storage.

It allows us not to purchase storage as aggressively as we used to; this has helped our organization.