Features - Storage Innovations:

AppIQ DEFINES STORAGE UTILITY MGMT WITH SolutionSuite 2.0

AppIQ has announced release 2.0 of AppIQ Solution Suite which is witnessing broad customer adoption in the Financial, Insurance and Media Markets including Nielsen Media Research, Boston Stock Exchange and The Weather Channel among others.

AppIQ Solution Suite is an integrated storage utility management solution that increases application storage infrastructure total value of ownership through a standards-based platform excelling in ease of deployment and rapid time-to-value. With release 2.0, AppIQ Solution Suite builds on a comprehensive management platform and adds business policy automation, risk analysis advisors, automated provisioning and integrated asset management and chargeback. Additionally, for the first time, customers can build on top of the AppIQ Solution Suite platform with OpenRAD -- a set of open development tools that allows customers to extend the AppIQ Solution Suite management platform. The result is an integrated application-to-storage solution enabling the management of your storage as a utility where storage is provided as a seamless service to the application.

"As the cost and complexity of enterprise storage continues to grow, The Weather Channel needs to build an effective storage utility that proactively manages cost with application service levels," said Kevin Gungiah, Director of Systems Administration at The Weather Channel whose SAN supports many critical applications including Weather Systems. "With AppIQ Solution Suite 2.0," said Kevin, "we are now able to proactively monitor, alert and resolve SAN problems with little or no impact to applications, and automate management of the underlying storage infrastructure in line with business processes so that an effective storage utility can be created and managed."

"The increasing business application availability and performance requirements are placing greater demands on storage and the ability to manage storage. This pushes demands of storage management products to be application based and more than just passive monitoring to deliver storage as a utility in order to satisfy these business requirements." said Raymond Paquet, vice president, research director, Gartner Group.

AppIQ Solution Suite 2.0

AppIQ Solution Suite -- which includes AppIQ Manager, AppIQ for Oracle and AppIQ for Microsoft Exchange -- provides integrated management of applications, servers, storage network and storage subsystem devices in a single, easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use application.

"With release 2.0, we've delivered an integrated solution for managing the storage utility that let's our customers not only get storage management costs under control, but at the same time align costs with service levels for maximum total value of ownership," said Ash Ashutosh, EVP and CTO at AppIQ. "In this release, AppIQ's addition of an integrated set of business tools and business policies has now provided our customers the ability to reach the utility vision."

AppIQ Solution Suite 2.0 enables the delivery of storage as a utility by providing a comprehensive set of Business Tools to automate the management of the underlying storage infrastructure.

Business Tools

AppIQ Solution Suite 2.0 introduces an integrated set of powerful business tools termed Advisors, Automators and Accountors that build upon the foundation of knowledge collected and analyzed in the AppIQ Solution Suite:

Advisors

Deliver expert analysis and advice on the state and risk of your environment such as non-compliant HBA or SAN switch firmware and unallocated or unmapped storage capacity.

Automators

Provide automation of complex, error-prone SAN management activities such as provisioning and HBA replacement or SAN switch firmware upgrades.

Accountors

Provide integrated asset management and cost accounting chargeback of storage resources.

OpenRAD

Release 2.0 also introduces AppIQ's Open Rapid Application Development (OpenRAD) environment which is a rich set of development tools, APIs, and ODBC/JDBC database development tools and interfaces for AppIQ customers and partners that want to write their own applications that advise, automate and account for their storage resources.

Business Policies

AppIQ Solution Suite 2.0 offers an integrated policy engine that combines infrastructure knowledge, business rules and threshold-based policy management across the entire infrastructure from applications, servers, network components down to the storage subsystems to recommend and/or automate solutions in a fraction of the time. In addition, customers achieve a TCO multiplier effect by leveraging the business policy engine with AppIQ Solution Suite's Business Tools or custom OpenRAD applications.

Role-Based Security

AppIQ Solution Suite 2.0 incorporates a customizable, easy to use and robust role-based security mechanism that allows an organization to manage the infrastructure consistent with the individual roles in an organization. Users can tailor not only the level of control that they can manage but also the scope of action. AppIQ Solution Suite's security model makes it possible for the executive management to view reports only; operations personnel to have read-only access to event management; and principal SAN engineers to provision and reconfigure elements within the infrastructure.

Trending Analysis

AppIQ Solution Suite's automated discovery, monitoring and analysis of capacity and performance of all the components in the infrastructure, including applications, servers, switches, HBAs and Storage Subsystems, allows the administrator to manage capacity and performance planning. With AppIQ Solution Suite 2.0, historical trends are extrapolated forward to forecast future capacity and performance demands and constraints, thereby increasing service levels, decreasing capital expenses and maximizing total value of ownership.

Management Built on the SMI-S

AppIQ Solution Suite is the first and only enterprise management software, built on the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), an industry standard created for heterogeneous storage network management based on the Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM). The implementation of these standards results in consistent terminology and usage practices resulting in lowered training costs, less human errors, and independence from vendors and/or technologies.

Pricing and Availability

AppIQ Solution Suite 2.0 is available immediately. Pricing is based on Managed Access Points and Managed Application Licenses.