Introduction of Aptare Community Cloud

In enterprise data center optimizatio, APTARE, Inc. announced the APTARE Community Cloud and enhanced storage array performance analytics for their StorageConsole unified storage management platform.

Leveraging APTARE's intellectual property for secure analytics in the cloud, the APTARE Community Cloud enables customers to view how their own storage environment performance compares with similar reference storage metrics shared across the global APTARE community. Using near real-time performance analytics not readily accessible from array vendors, customers can determine if their storage is meeting the same or better performance as their peers in like storage environments to identify areas of improvement.

"With increasing data growth and storage costs, IT departments are under intense pressure to extract the highest performance possible from their storage," said Rick Clark, President and CEO of APTARE. "Vendor storage performance management tools offer little assistance as they require arcane knowledge and provide insufficient analytics. The APTARE Community Cloud delivers APTARE's vision for a vendor independent, cloud powered data center optimization solution that enables customers to identify performance problems more quickly by tapping into the intelligence and analytics managed in the cloud."

IT storage departments that 'opt-in' to the APTARE Community Cloud can post securely and anonymously, storage performance statistics into the APTARE cloud. APTARE maintains a repository of these storage profiles and aggregates and groups the information by similar storage configurations using metrics such as array vendor, product type, RAID type, and drive speed. Over time, this data aggregation becomes a robust performance profile that customers can download and compare their environment against an industry benchmark of similarly configured storage environments.

"User groups and community websites are typically very valuable sources of unbiased information for practitioners to improve upon best practices," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at ESG. "APTARE's Community Cloud will allow organizations to post and view information covering a wide range of vendors and array types. This will provide APTARE customers with the added benefit of being able to quickly and easily benchmark their level of storage performance and make adjustments if required."