HighGround Systems, a provider of Microsoft Windows NT-based storage resource monitoring and management solutions and the developer of the Storage Resource Manager (SRM) product family, is developing the removable storage management service that Microsoft is including as an integral, strategic part of Windows 2000.
To address the exploding storage requirements for NT and to provide the scalability and data availability needed by enterprise customers, Microsoft chose HighGround to develop a standard tool and programming interface to manage removable storage resources in Windows 2000.
With the current version of NT, application developers who require support for removable media devices must develop their own solutions, usually including proprietary media managers and custom device drivers. Over the years, this has created problems for IT managers, hardware vendors and application developers, by adding to the time and resources they must spend to manage these storage devices, by rendering the devices "unshareable" by multiple applications, and by making it harder for advancements in removable storage technology to be quickly adopted.
The removable storage management (RSM) service addresses these problems by providing a common graphical tool and standard programming interfaces for managing tape, optical, and CD-ROM robotic libraries, drives and media. It also enables multiple data management applications (backup/recovery, archive, hierarchical storage management, document imaging) to share the same tape, CD-ROM or optical library.
With the Windows 2000-based RSM, system administrators can:
Increase Windows 2000 scalability and data and application availability through fast deployment of automated storage solutions.
Reduce the cost of ownership of Windows 2000-based systems through full usage of removable media devices.
Cut the amount of IT staff time devoted to media management through the use of a common, embedded toolset.
HighGround products are distributed in South Africa by NT software specialist Server Tools, a company in the Dimension Data group.
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