Aptare Enhances Storage Resource Management Offering

The only pure-play storage resource management (SRM) vendor in the visionary category of Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software," Aptare is looking to further separate itself with significant enhancements (Feature Pack One) to its unified storage management product suite, StorageConsole.

The biggest innovation is an agent-less host data collector that applies multiple methods in order to capture storage capacity metrics from the hosts and heterogeneous storage systems. The collector "learns" and optimizes its data collection for subsequent scheduled collections.

There are hundreds of enhancements in Feature Pack One, but the two major ones are related to capacity and backup management, says the company, which focuses on the global 50,000.

The capacity enhancements include storage array support for EMC Symmetrix VMAX and Hitachi VSP/HP StorageWorks P9500, capacity and forecasting for EMC Virtual (Thin) Volume Pools (Clariion, DMX and VMAX), and chargeback for replicated volumes. On the backup side, there is now advanced support for EMC Data Domain that includes capacity and predictive analysis, as well as reporting on EMC Avamar replication processes.

There are a number of strengths to StorageConsole, but the ability to provide this information in an "agentless" manner is really forcing change in the landscape, says Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Organizations don't want to dedicate resources to managing an SRM solution and updating agents; rather, SRM solutions need to be easy to install, simple to maintain, and provide actionable information where and when it is needed so organizations can make intelligent decisions regarding their storage infrastructure."Enterprise Strategy Group is seeing more organizations consuming SRM as a service, leveraging the information collected without having to worry about deploying and maintaining software, he says. "Aptare is definitely one of the leaders in these areas and continues to set the bar for intelligent and agentless information collection, reporting flexibility and choice of consumption model."

The two biggest storage management trends going forward are the increased use of server virtualization technology and managing data growth, says Laliberte. "They're not unrelated, especially when you consider that virtualized server environments need a networked storage environment in order to take advantage of all those great mobility functions like vMotion, DRS, high availability, etc."

Organizations need to be able to manage their storage environment more effectively to remain competitive in their respective markets, he says. "Server virtualization has brought tremendous advances for provisioning new virtual machines, minutes or hours instead of days and weeks. The storage environment needs to be able to respond to these new demands, and the only way they can do that is if they have the correct and current information about their storage environment. Organizations are also turning to storage virtualization technologies, deduplication, etc., to drive greater efficiencies. So it is critical that organizations have the insight and visibility into these virtualized [thin provisioned or fully virtualized]and deduplicated environments so they can make the appropriate decisions on where to provision new storage, when to order more and how to optimize existing investments."

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