Features - Storage Innovations:

MonoSphere DELIVERS LATEST RELEASE OF MonoSphere STO MANAGER

MonoSphere Inc, an industry leader in cross-platform Automated Storage Resource Management (ASRM) software solutions, has announced the general availability of the MonoSphere Storage Manager (MSM) v2.0 product suite with enhanced features offering businesses improved data protection, data movement, reporting, notification, and expanded operating system support across heterogeneous storage environments.

Highlights of key features in MonoSphere Storage Manager v2.0 include:

• Data Protection Module: manages data protection processes such as synchronous data mirroring and replication spanning heterogeneous storage devices. The module can utilize a local or remote ATA disk-based device as a disk-based backup target for DAS, SAN and NAS devices. It can then temporarily break the logical connection to the live data and use backup software to archive the ATA disk-based storage to tape. Additionally, it can create and manage replicated volumes as business continuance volumes on heterogeneous storage devices, giving enterprises maximum flexibility over their storage hardware deployment.
• Data Mover Module (DMM): optimizes data movement by using dedicated low-cost commodity servers as data movement off-load engines. It consists of an XML interface to the MSM 2.0 communication layer and a SCSI driver interface to the peripheral and storage networking ports on the dedicated servers. The DMM is used to distribute storage provisioning tasks such as data migration, data replication and data placement optimization so that they can be done in parallel to boost performance in high-throughput enterprise storage environments. MonoSphere Storage Manager 2.0 handles load balancing across DMMs to minimize any impact on the CPUs, HBAs or NICs of the application servers participating in MonoSphere dynamic storage pools.
• Reporting Module: provides a variety of standard reports for use by the storage administrator. These include activity reports, detailed I/O analysis reports, and capacity reports analyzing free and used capacities and trends in MonoSphere dynamic storage pools. Other reports are used for predictive capacity modeling and quota reporting. The robust report generator enables users, partners, or MonoSphere Professional Services to generate custom reports by applying additional filtering and sorting criteria.
• Notification Module: takes actions based on the occurrence of certain events monitored by the MSM policy module. It can generate alerts and notify users of events via email and 'Short Message Service' (SMS) messages. SMS messages are alphanumeric text messages of a few hundred characters that can be sent for immediate display on the screens of pagers and cellular/wireless telephones.
• Expanded Operating System Support: adds Sun Solaris to the list of operating systems supported by MonoSphere Storage Manager. Support now includes Sun Solaris 2.1, 7x, 8.x, and 9x.

"In today's economy, IT data centers are constantly under pressure to do far more with less," said Ray Villeneuve, MonoSphere's president and CEO. "MonoSphere Storage Manager v2.0 allows data centers to use their resources in a more cost efficient manner. MonoSphere is committed to developing innovative software solutions that focus on real world business challenges including storage allocation, business continuity, disaster recovery, and the skyrocketing cost of storage management."

"We've had MonoSphere in production for several months now running on hundreds of servers across the organization," said Dodi Berger, Storage Architect at Comverse Software. "The result has been much better utilization of our high-performance Symmetrix boxes with low-activity data being moved to commodity storage... At the same time, our DAS system stability and availability has improved."

MonoSphere Storage Manager v2.0 is now shipping to existing customers with 30 day general availability for new orders.