And theyve also given the technology underpinning InterSANs software an important sounding name -- VPD, for Virtual Private Datapath -- which theyre busy getting patented. Nice.
Theyre also lining up customers. The first one will be a storage service provider (SSP), to be announced in August.
All the same, theres clearly some meat to InterSANs claims that its raising the bar in network storage management software, as Karen Dutch, InterSANs director of product marketing puts it.
In simple terms, VPD establishes and manages the communication between applications on the server and the storage they require. It runs a continual health check on the configuration and discovery of all the devices between the two ends and the topology of these in the network to keep the system running smoothly.
Sounds like most storage management software, which it is, except that InterSAN has gone the next step. VPD is also able to automate storage provisioning, lowering the typical human costs involved in managing storage by $250,000 a year, the company claims. In automatically assigning certain storage to certain applications, it saves 30 to 50 steps that would usually have to be manually configured.