Aptare Expands SRM StorageConsole

Enterprise storage resource management company APTARE, Inc. released the newest version of its flagship platform, APTARE StorageConsole 7.0. This release includes new functionality giving users greater control of storage resources within VMware virtualized server and NetApp replication environments.

APTARE StorageConsole 7.0 expands the company’s product suite through the introduction of two new products, APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager and APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager. APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager allows customers to effectively plan, manage and optimize storage resources in their virtualized environments. APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager gives customers the tools to measure compliance, maximize resources and improve the performance of their business continuity environments.

The company also added usability improvements to the APTARE StorageConsole Web 2.0 platform and broadened the product support in its APTARE StorageConsole Capacity Manager and Backup Manager products.

These announcements continue APTARE’s success in delivering key storage resource management solutions to enterprises looking to maximize their storage investments. “APTARE is definitely making the right moves here, delivering replication reporting support for NetApp environments and giving customers an intuitive way to manage storage resources not only in the physical world, but in the virtual world as well,” said Deni Connor, principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW. “In this economic environment, it is critical to understand what you have and what you don’t, and users have tended to take that for granted. APTARE StorageConsole 7.0 is impressive in its breadth and depth, as well as for the level of insight it provides across a wide range of vendor storage platforms.”

APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager
Virtualization of server environments offers great promise in improving the overall efficiency of today’s data centers. However, ad hoc deployment of applications and their associated operating systems as virtual machines (VM) often results in inefficient use of the physical resources that underpin the virtual environment – including storage systems. APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager tackles this problem by allowing storage administrators to clearly see what is happening with the storage resources used in virtual environments so that they can make smarter decisions. This new product offering is built to optimize storage use across VMware deployments and complements VMware’s vCenter in these key ways:

• Enhances planning: Provides insight ahead of time into how best to deploy an application in a virtual environment, given current storage resource utilization and constraints.
• Addresses the ‘virtual sprawl’ problem: Delivers detailed information needed to make sense of the often rapid and unplanned growth of VM deployments, highlighting areas of oversubscription of scarce real storage resources as well as assets that may be forgotten or underutilized.
• Improves performance: Allows users to analyze each VM to ensure adequate performance, correct tiering of physical storage and identify potential contention issues or bottlenecks that can impact performance.

“Our customers have expressed that virtualization and server consolidations are proving to be more difficult to manage than they had predicted,” said Richard Clark, president and CEO of APTARE. “Existing solutions lack the basic tools to identify storage efficiency problems that can arise as these virtual environments grow more complex. We are tackling these issues head-on with APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager, giving users the capability to easily and cost effectively plan, troubleshoot and fine tune the storage resources used in their VMware deployments.”

APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager initially supports VMware ESX environments, version 3.0 or higher, with future support planned for Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. It is seamlessly integrated with the other APTARE StorageConsole products – Backup Manager, Capacity Manager and Replication Manager – and is available immediately. List price is $1,495 per physical VM server, with bundle and suite pricing also available.

APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager
The new APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager provides advanced reporting to help administrators effectively measure compliance, maximize storage resources and improve the overall performance of their NetApp replication environments. This product’s reporting capabilities allow users to proactively view and monitor key tasks, from ensuring that replication policies and service level agreements are being met, to examining the stability of mirrored data on replication volumes. It also helps to maximize storage utilization by giving users the ability to see which storage capacity is really necessary for snapshot and mirrored volumes, and which is wasted.

Users can gain deeper insights into how to control replication costs as well. For example, APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager can be used to examine the impact of moving destination replication volumes to lower-cost tiered storage systems or changing the retention period of these volumes. Chargeback reports can be generated based on replication consumption levels, along with associated costs based on user-defined pricing.

APTARE StorageConsole Replication Manager supports NetApp’s SnapMirror, SnapVault and FlexClone environments, with plans to expand to other vendor replication products in the future. It integrates with the other APTARE StorageConsole products – Backup Manager, Capacity Manager and Virtualization Manager – and is available immediately. List price is $9,995 per array, with bundle and suite pricing also available.

Improved Support for APTARE StorageConsole Backup Manager and Capacity Manager
APTARE continues to enhance its core products – APTARE StorageConsole Backup Manager and APTARE StorageConsole Capacity Manager – with support for additional backup and storage systems. In APTARE StorageConsole Backup Manager, support has been added for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to complement the release of APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager. APTARE StorageConsole Capacity Manager now supports additional vendor storage arrays, including IBM’s DS3000, DS4000, DS5000, DS6000 and DS8000 series storage arrays, and LSI storage systems.

Enhanced APTARE StorageConsole Platform
The foundation for the entire APTARE product suite is the APTARE StorageConsole 7.0 platform. This platform delivers comprehensive reporting and management tools for storage environments using Internet standards and Web 2.0 technologies. These Web 2.0 technologies include ‘drag and drop’ reports, tabbed browsing and right-click menus, providing effortless access to reports and custom presentations of how users view, organize and share information they need. New features in APTARE StorageConsole 7.0 include community-based report development and sharing, policy-based alerting and advanced report filtering. The platform also provides the most popular reports right out of the box, enabling users to be quickly proficient in diagnosing and managing their storage environment.

The APTARE StorageConsole 7.0 product suite is available directly from APTARE and through its worldwide alliance of resellers and managed storage services providers, including Datalink, FusionStorm and Orchesys. APTARE products can also be purchased through APTARE partners as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.