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."