Shine a guiding light on your disk tiering with Lumen

There are thousands of combinations of manual decisions that go into managing cloud storage. IT, cloud, and DevOps teams must make a call on disk sizing, disk tiering, IOPS, redundancy, backups, encryption, and more for every new disk while balancing uptime, performance, cost, security, and compliance. What each disk requires is hard to predict, and may change quickly. As a result, most organizations choose to play it safe and provision much more than is needed, as the downside of undershooting it is downtime and performance bottlenecks. 

Let’s take a look at just one of these decisions – disk tiering. There are 6+ disk tiers available in the cloud, each with differing levels of IOPS, throughput, latency, and cost. Once a disk is live, key usage metrics are scattered across different portals, making visibility and analysis a challenging exercise. Even if a team identifies a disk that should be re-tiered up or down, doing so is not straightforward. It’s possible to convert disks to a different tier manually, but that requires downtime, and can only be done a couple of times per day. Teams lack the visibility and actionable insights necessary to properly manage their disk tiering at scale, let alone all the other aspects of cloud storage management they must handle. 

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Introducing Lumen: bringing unified visibility and actionable recommendations to cloud storage

At Lucidity, we’ve set out to make storage management simple. This began with AutoScaler, which solved the problem of overprovisioning with autonomous rightsizing. To solve problems like disk tiering, we are introducing Lumen, the visibility, recommendations, and actions engine for cloud storage. Starting with disk tiering, Lumen streamlines cloud storage management for IT, DevOps, and Cloud teams by delivering unified visibility, data-driven recommendations, and one-click, downtime-free actions. 

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See your key cloud storage metrics in one place

Seamless cloud storage management starts with visibility. Lumen unifies key storage metrics from across different cloud portals, evaluating key metrics such as IOPS, throughput, latency and cost to determine if the current disk tier is optimal.

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The dashboard highlights your progress and current state for tiering efficiency and cost savings, while delivering a high-level breakdown of all tiering recommendations still to be undertaken. Quickly understand the potential savings you could realize and the types of conversions that Lumen recommends.

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By bringing analysis of your VMs into one dashboard, you can see at a glance what percentage of your disks are using the optimal tier, how much you’ve saved, and the full potential impact of Lucidity’s recommendations in one place.

Streamline disk tiering with actionable recommendations based on your actual usage data

Getting visibility into your environment is just the start. Lumen analyzes your historical IOPS, throughput, latency, and cost for every disk to determine if the current disk tier is optimal. Based on the results across 30, 60, or 90 day windows, Lumen surfaces recommended tiering conversions in one simple list, with the ability to drill down into the data behind the recommendation. 

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Lumen will recommend that disks are downtiered if the chosen tier is unnecessary for actual usage, helping teams remove wasted spend. For any disks that have too low a tier for actual usage, Lumen will recommend uptiering to improve performance and remove bottlenecks. 

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You can view the sum total of Lumen’s recommendations, grouped by recommended disk tier type, see the potential savings impact for each conversion, and make changes with one click. You can also drill down into a recommendation. 

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Each VM has a deep dive into a multidimensional cost and performance analysis, allowing users to compare performance and cost of their current tier and the Lucidity recommended tier. For each VM, Lucidity displays historical IOPS and throughput data as a percentage of disk capacity. By clicking into one of Lumen’s recommended tier changes, you can visualize what percentage of the recommended disk tier IOPS and throughput capacity your historical usage would consume. Lumen also displays the percentage change for maximum IOPS and throughput, median latency, and cost per year that you would see by converting to the recommended disk tier. 

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Convert disk tiers with no downtime

Beyond analyzing your usage to recommend tiering changes, Lumen enables you to convert disk tiers with one click and no downtime. With a simple click of a button, you can change the tier of your chosen disk without the need to reboot your VM. This streamlines the process that you would face by converting disk tiers manually in Azure, reducing the number of steps and the need to take your VM offline to change disk tiers. 

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Clicking to change tiers will bring up a schedule window that lets you review the proposed change, see the cost savings impact of the change, and choose the date and time for the conversion. This greatly speeds up re-tiering at scale efforts like Azure Premium SSD v1 to v2 conversions.

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Reduce wasted cloud spend and optimize application performance with Lumen

By analyzing key disk metrics across your environment and grouping recommended disk tiering conversions together for seamless one-click conversions, Lumen greatly streamlines the process for managing disk tiering. With Lumen, you can get unprecedented visibility, actionable recommendations, and simple actions to manage disk tiering in Azure like never before. Lumen empowers you to:

• Uncover new ways to reduce your cloud spend
  
  • Remove wasted spend by using the right tier for your actual IOPS and throughput requirements. Convert disks to a cheaper tier as appropriate based on your real usage
• Optimize your disk performance
  
  • Convert disks to the right tier with no performance impact or downtime. See key metrics and disk tiering recommendations so you can optimize application performance with a single click.
• Manage your cloud storage faster than ever before
  
  • With unified visibility into key storage metrics and intelligent data analysis handled automatically, make improvements to your cloud storage environment with less effort and resources

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To see Lumen in action, register for the upcoming webinar or visit https://www.lucidity.cloud/book-demo to get a demo directly.