Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a subsidiary of Japanese electronics giant Hitachi, has extended its North American reseller agreement of InterSAN storage management software to Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
<B>HDS storage management grows 77% in 2002</B>
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) reports "the fastest growth in storage management software among the 10 leading vendors in this arena" for the second year in a row, in 2002.
The company quotes a Gartner Dataquest report which states that HDS was one of only three vendors in this field to show growth in a market which declined 6% overall. HDS, currently the sixth largest vendor of storage management software, grew 77% in 2002.
Gartner ranks HDS the second largest vendor in enterprise storage resource management, puts it second in device resource management and third in data replication software.
The company`s emphasis on software is only two years old, and with its increasingly coherent total storage strategy, TruNorth, growth is expected to continue.
Bob Plumridge, HDS director of software product management, says the company`s decision to move beyond mass storage devices is a central part of its one-year-old TrueNorth strategy. TrueNorth encompasses a three-way focus on storage systems, a collaborative business model based on open standards and a centralised management framework based on interoperability standards.
Plumridge says HDS, represented in SA by storage integrator Shoden, has already received requests for quotations from prospective customers in the region.
InterSAN facts and figures
InterSAN is an independent provider of storage management software and will remain so, says Karen Dutch, marketing director. Dutch is a 26-year veteran of storage management.
InterSAN has $28 million in venture capital funding. It was founded in January 2000, is headquartered in California and shipped its first software in 2001. Its reseller agreement with HDS is two years old, and it joined HDS`s HiCommand development programme around the same time. HiCommand is HDS`s centralised, automated device management platform.
The agreement includes certification of HDS`s staff in the applicable regions to sell and support InterSAN`s application, called Pathline, and to enable them to offer consulting, implementation and training services, Dutch says.
"The combination of Hitachi Freedom Storage devices and HiCommand Device Manager with Pathline gives customers advanced storage solutions, allowing them to manage growth and providing quality of services in an affordable, manageable and secure environment."
Beyond buzz
Dutch says Pathline provides policy-based automation of storage management that reduces complexity and the cost of management.
Having joined HiCommand in July 2001, InterSAN adopted HDS`s industry standard application programming interfaces, and integrated its offering with HDS`s devices.
InterSAN Pathline`s core functionality is to provide a viewing, managing, configuring and monitoring tool to the increasingly complex topology of today`s storage area networks (SANs). In 2000, SAN management tools represented less than 1% of storage resource management revenues, but this grew to 31% in 2002.
Integrated with HiCommand, Pathline automatically provisions, manages and monitors HDS`s Freedom range of devices in a distributed environment. Provisioning centres on better utilisation of storage devices, as research figures show resources can be under-utilised by as much as 50%, and that often an application spikes in use and needs more storage provisioning.
"Because storage management that isn`t based on automated, user-defined policies is a highly time-consuming, costly and error-prone exercise, the value in a system that automatically discovers and manages and provisions the correct storage to the correct person at the right time is clear as daylight," Dutch says.
"It ensures application availability, optimises resource use and reduces staffing costs," Plumridge adds. Pathline requires HiCommand Device Manager to support HDS Freedom Storage.
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