Northern to Demo New Version of Storage Suite

NORTHERN will be showcasing the Northern Storage Suite 8.5 at EMC World, which is designed to address a business challenge: efficiently constraining massive data growth, aligning the value of data with the cost of storage and extending the life of storage infrastructure.

Having received recognition as Offering of the Year for EMC Celerra, the new version of the suite enables customers to further leverage EMC technology, bringing state-of-the-art storage resource management to Celerra NAS devices and extending HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) support through HSM-aware quotas and HSM-tailored reports.

The suite’s storage reporter component now offers administrators both quick and deep visibility into aging data, enabling them to identify outdated or unused files wherever they may reside. So, in addition to managing user data based on usage thresholds, data distributed across volumes and file types, administrators can see percentages of seldom used or modified files per host, volume, share, and user. Also, a new, easy-to-use customizable reporter interface allows users to choose list or graphical display, select which column to sort on and how to sort, and view in bytes or dynamic units, further increasing granularity in the reports.

“As more companies realize the benefits of a tiered storage approach, deeper visibility into aging data enables them to put in place rules that reorganize corporate data on a variety of storage media,” says Thomas Vernersson, CEO of Northern. "This allows system administrators to optimize their storage infrastructure by aligning data with its value to the organization. The new version of Northern Storage Suite works seamlessly with EMC Celerra devices, providing , file blocking, and user tools that allow customers to simplify user data management across the enterprise, while facilitating compliance with regulatory and legal data storage requirements."

Northern Storage Suite 8.5 allows administrators to set quotas on multiple tiers of storage or, if preferred, on only the primary layer. This enables them to correlate the value of data to the value of the storage device (i.e., identifying frequently accessed files, which can be stored on expensive Fibre Channel storage, and identifying seldom-accessed files that can be moved to inexpensive SATA disks). Organizations who’ve implemented an HSM solution can now maximize their returns by better monitoring and managing physical and logical usage. They can more easily move ‘dated’ data to less expensive or secondary storage, making the best use of more expensive primary storage, while lowering the cost of retaining fixed content data for indefinite periods of time.

Northern Storage Suite 8.5 also introduces next-generation scanning technology, providing robust, multi-threaded file monitoring and more precise resource utilization. The engine automatically resumes scans from the point they’ve been suspended or interrupted (i.e., for system troubleshooting or maintenance) without losing data that has already been collected.

In 2008, the suite received an EMC Velocity² Technology and ISV Program ‘2008 EMC Partner Solution Award, receiving recognition for Offering of the Year for EMC Celerra. EMC conducts an annual competition among its solution providers to determine which stand out as the ‘best of the best’ for developing solutions built on or using EMC storage.