Aptare Upgrades Its StorageConsole

APTARE, Inc. announced upgrades to its StorageConsole product suite. These enhancements help data center administrators effectively improve storage utilization in both physical and virtual server environments.

‘Virtual sprawl’ is proving to be a major problem for storage administrators as the rapid growth of virtual machines makes it difficult to get a true picture of resource utilization in enterprise data centers worldwide. APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager allows IT professionals to take control of the situation by providing immediate detailed reporting of the virtual environment, highlighting areas of storage resource performance contention as well as real storage assets that may be forgotten, underutilized or over-provisioned.

APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager excels at reclaiming ‘dark storage’ that has been lost within a virtual environment and relieving the pressure put on by wasteful snapshot archiving. The software helps both server and storage administrators account for and view each ESX server, virtual machine and its associated storage, providing a complete end-to-end view that results in improved storage utilization and optimized performance.

"One of the key benefits of virtual environments – the ease and speed at which new servers can be deployed – also contributes to more complexity and inefficiency due to a lack of tools that provide visibility of how to plan for and use those servers," said Richard Clark, president and CEO of APTARE. "APTARE’s StorageConsole Virtualization Manager software solves the problem by giving administrators insight, ahead of time, into how to best deploy virtual applications, including understanding their current storage utilization and constraints."

Included in APTARE StorageConsole Virtualization Manager 7.1 is complete performance metrics maintained for each ESX server, their virtual machines and connected storage resources. This information can be used to forecast potential performance bottlenecks before they occur. Storage I/O counts and latencies can quickly point out over- and undersubscribed ESX servers as well as ‘hot’ virtual machines that are consuming I/O resources, potentially impacting the performance of other virtual machines.

The new APTARE StorageConsole 7.1 delivers additional support of VMware vSphere 4.0 and ESX 4.0 via the StorageConsole Virtualization Manager product. Users can set up automated alerts to flag when a virtual machine has reached predetermined storage usage thresholds. APTARE demonstrates the new software in Booth No. 2512, August 31 – September 3 during the VMworld 2009 industry conference in San Francisco.

APTARE StorageConsole 7.1 Product Suite Enhancements
APTARE continues to enhance its StorageConsole platform by offering new usability, report templates, advanced report design and security features. These capabilities are applicable across the entire APTARE StorageConsole product suite.

Support has been added to APTARE StorageConsole Backup Manager for VERITAS NetBackup storage lifecycle policies and VERITAS NetBackup synthetic backups as well as support for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) 6.1.

APTARE StorageConsole Capacity Manager now includes chargeback accounting at the individual host server level through enhanced chargeback policy management. New chargeback policy management features provide customers with the ability to define policies regarding their storage infrastructure costs and the ability to tailor these policies based on definable attributes representing a storage class or tier.