iWave Debuts Storage Automator V6

A privately-held affiliate of the Hall Financial Group., iWave Software LLC, provider of storage and cloud automation solutions, announced Storage Automator version 6 (v6), a storage automation software product that lets enterprise IT organizations and service providers deliver Storage as a Service using their existing storage environments.

By allowing end users to provision their own storage via a service portal, it helps IT organizations lower storage operating costs, support more storage with fewer administrators and improve end user satisfaction, while enforcing best practices for storage provisioning.

Storage Automator v6 will be available to qualified customers on July 23, 2012, with general availability planned for September 2012.

"The goal of storage automation software like iWave Storage Automator is to have less people spend less time focused on managing storage," said George Crump, CEO of analyst firm Storage Switzerland. "While not a replacement for skilled storage administrators, these next-generation storage automation products incorporate concepts from the cloud automation world and offer the promise of significant productivity gains by enabling administrators to create and offer automated storage services directly to their users via a self-service portal and catalog."

Organizations can deploy Storage Automator v6 within the walls of their data center to offer their end users secure, automated storage provisioning through a private storage cloud. Service providers can deploy it to both end user and corporate customers over the Internet as a public storage cloud service.

Key features of iWave Storage Automator v6:

Policy-based storage selection: provides a rules engine that can automatically match an application or host-operating system’s storage requirement to the most appropriate storage resources. This ensures that the right storage is allocated for the right application.
Multi-tenant, self-service portal and catalog: offers a user interface that lets end users order automated storage services. Service providers can leverage the portal to offer storage services to multiple customers over the Internet.
End-to-end automated storage services: offers automated storage provisioning, reclamation and remediation services. Provisioning services include automatically selecting the best possible storage, provisioning the storage, manipulating the storage fabric and configuring the host operating system or application to use the storage.
RESTful storage API: iWave automated storage services can be used through storage API. Enterprise IT organizations and service providers can integrate the software into their existing portal or enterprise orchestration tool using the storage API.
Change control, scheduling and notification: organizations can leverage their existing change management system. All automated services can be scheduled to run during maintenance windows and provide email notification when they have completed.
Service level options: allows enterprise IT departments and service providers to offer ‘Gold,’ ‘Silver,’ and ‘Bronze’ storage services that are driven by the tier of storage and data protection policies applied.
Chargeback: offers chargeback information for storage provisioned using Storage Automator v6. This chargeback information can be fed into an enterprise IT department’s or service provider’s billing system.

"Our new release of Storage Automator represents a significant step forward for storage automation," said Brent Rhymes, CEO of iWave Software. "v6 is the first out-of-the-box product that offers policy-based, end-to-end automation of storage provisioning, reclamation and remediation services. These services can be served up either via our multi-tenanted, self-service portal or via the iWave Storage Automator v6 RESTful Storage API."

iWave was demonstrating its Storage Automator v6 solution at EMC World in Las Vegas from May 21-24, 2012.