TeraCloud expands application-based storage mgmt

Users wanting to monitor and manage the storage resources assigned to business-critical applications will now be able to do so more precisely and in real-time fashion with a new version of storage software that TeraCloud Corp. rolled out last week.

SpaceNet 3.0, storage resource management software for Unix, Linux, Windows, Linux, as well as IBM OS/390 mainframe environments introduces the capability to manage a wider variety of network, server and storage-area network-attached storage. This version also adds the ability to define areas of storage that could be troublesome, customize the administrator's view of stored data based on the application that is using it and create more detailed search capability, allowing users to expose potential problems in real-time fashion.

SpaceNet incorporates a Dashboard, a text- or graphic-based view of the storage environment that helps administrators create specialized real-time views of applications and the storage they consume. Storage can be grouped by application, business process or logical business. For instance, a storage administrator may have 100 policies he sets for his environment. Of those 100 policies, five represent potential problems for systems operations. With SpaceNet, the administrator can add those systems to the SpaceNet Dashboard where they can view and monitor the customized data in realtime.

Robert Kuene, lead storage analyst for energy company Excelon in Chicago has tried SpaceNet and likes the idea of the customized dashboard.

"We have given SpaceNet to our (Oracle) database administrators so they can monitor utilization and capacity and notify us when they need more storage," says Kuehne, who has 12 terabytes of storage on EMC Symmetrix arrays and Sun servers managed by SpaceNet.

"Now instead of telling us that they estimate they will need an additional 20 percent storage, the can ask us for exactly what they want, Kuehne says. With SpaceNet, database administrators can set up a dashboard for each instance of Oracle application running on the network and allocate more storage as needed.

In addition, Spacenet has enhanced its searching capability that helps customers find the root cause of their storage problems so they can more effectively load balance, back up or provision storage. A customer, for instance, could have a server that is reaching saturation, which if it occurs could cause a failure to an application and to the server. With multicriteria search capability, the customer can uncover the problem and then instruct the software to delete, migrate or provision more storage resources.

TeraCloud's has products for the OS/390 mainframe environment that have typically competed with EMC, Computer Associates and other large mainframe software vendors. SpaceNet competes with software from Veritas and Tivoli.

The company, a former software vendor of mainframe storage software called Trilogy Software, changed its name when it introduced its first open systems software for storage in December 2001.

SpaceNet is priced by the number of terabytes under management. It starts at US$30,000 per terabyte.

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