Acquisitions and partnerships
One of Sterling's specialities is managing the growing number of data repositories that the typical enterprise is now generating with e-business applications. The goal is for information managers to have a common view of the information stored on their systems, be they storage area networks (SANs), client PCs or mainframes. Sterling's SAMS:Vantage 4.02 system is one of the first systems available that can manage data storage across different storage systems. Through support for policy-based data management, the system allows users to automate the entire process of storage management, including file management. This becomes all the more necessary as the volume of data to be stored and managed grows. It is common for enterprises to generate many terabytes of data, and such volumes simply cannot be managed manually.
Other companies on the acquisition trail include storage equipment giant EMC, which recently acquired both Softworks and Terascape, specialist developers of storage management software.
In addition to full takeovers, partnership deals are growing more popular. Legato recently struck a deal with HighGround Systems, which will add the latter's Storage Resource Manager to Legato's Global Enterprise Management suite. This is designed to provide enterprise-wide backup facilities, with the HighGround component adding greater central management control by offering analysis, reports and forecasts about system disk capacity. The objective is to give IT managers better control over the planning of backup and recovery processes.
The Internet is also offering users an alternative to the practice of mirroring critical data on different storage systems that are geographically separated. This can improve data security, but until now it has been expensive because it required dedicated leased lines between sites, forcing IT managers to be circumspect over the number of mirror sites used and the amount of data selected to be mirrored.
EMC is offering mirrored data management that takes advantage of the reduced communication costs of the Internet. Working with Computer Network Technology (CNT) in the US, it has upgraded its Symmetrix Remote Data Facility to allow IT managers to perform mirroring between Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems over IP via virtual private networks (VPNs).
VPNs allow secure communication over a public network and are a widely used alternative to dedicated leased lines. However, IP is geared to small data packet transfers and random read/write activity, which runs counter to the way storage systems work. To overcome this, CNT has developed a storage transport protocol that will operate over IP networks. It includes a compression algorithm to convert leased-line data frames into standard IP packets.
Another problem with IP networks is that they tend to be slower than dedicated lines. The system could time out and declare incoming data invalid, while that data is still trying to make its way across the network. CNT has therefore slackened the time-out requirements, making more time for resolving network anomalies.
