Storage At Your Service

Onaro took the wraps off the latest version of its flagship storage resource management (SRM) software this week, adding application-centric management, among other features.

Onaro, which boasts more than 70 customers and is in its fourth profitable quarter, is expanding beyond its initial change management focus into broader storage services management.

SANscreen Foundation 3.5 includes the ability to align storage infrastructures with a specific application, improved service quality tracking, capacity planning capability and a ready-to-use IT storage portal.

“SANscreen Foundation’s new ability to link applications to the infrastructure is essential for organizations to align storage resources with business requirements,” said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Bob Laliberte.

SANscreen Foundation 3.5 lets storage managers view the services delivered by the storage environment to underlying applications instead of just the host so they can manage at the application level, and it also includes improved service quality, reducing outages through service violation tracking and reporting.

“Our goal is to get the defect rate as close to zero as possible so the chance of an outage is as close to zero as possible,” said Onaro marketing vice president Bryan Semple.

Michael Passe, senior storage architect of Boston-based healthcare provider Care Group, uses both Onaro SANscreen and EMC ControlCenter.

“ECC is a really good provisioning tool,” said Passe. “It does some monitoring, but it’s not really good at alerting you about what’s going on in your environment. SANscreen, on the other hand, alerts you in real time, so they’re kind of complementary.”

SANscreen, he says, “has helped us with uptime and helped us to make sure we have the redundancy I think we have.” He’s also pleased with the new version 3.5 features, particularly the application-centric view.

Pricing for SANscreen Foundation starts at $185 per port.

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