Onaro One-Ups SRM

Software maker Onaro plans to upgrade its products next week in a campaign to distinguish itself from other storage resource management (SRM) suppliers.

The planned rollout includes:

• SANscreen Foundation 3: The latest upgrade includes new reports on service quality, chargeback, and security violations. It now specifies the composition of violations -- reporting, for instance, how many violations came from unauthorized ports, missing redundancy, missing active host ports, unauthorized sharing, path outages, and so on.
• SANscreen Replication Assurance: This is a new name for the former SANscreen Business Continuity module, which is now aimed at verifying that data replicated to a remote site can be recovered.
• SANscreen Performance Insight: This new module ties into Onaro's core product and reports on how an over- or under-utilized storage port affects applications tied to that port. It also correlates changes in the SAN to service-level changes, bringing a service viewpoint to performance management.

The tweaks come as Onaro tries to head off SRM vendors such as EMC and Hewlett-Packard (the latter with technology acquired from AppIQ). (See EMC Tackles Change Management.) While competitors like these are creeping into Onaro's speciality of change management, the vendor plans to stay ahead of the curve with a new message.

Onaro is billing itself, not as as an SRM vendor, but as one that provides storage services management (SSM). The idea is to go beyond just reporting changes to the storage environment, delivering info on how changes affect the delivery of storage as an IT service.

"Change management is required, but performance may not be impacted by changes in the environment," says Onaro marketing VP Bryan Semple.