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MonoSphere PARTNERS WITH INTRANSA

MonoSphere Inc, an industry leader in cross-platform Automated Storage Management (ASM) software solutions, announced a joint marketing agreement with Intransa, a pioneer in full-featured, enterprise-class IP-based Storage Area Networks (SAN), to dramatically lower the cost of management, backup and data protection for existing direct-attached storage (DAS) environments. "Today's standard approach to managing DAS is unwieldy and costly," said Ray Villeneuve, MonoSphere's president and CEO. "MonoSphere and Intransa bring the benefits of automated management and low cost networked storage to IT departments challenged to get more capacity, speed and service out of current DAS investments."

"Working with MonoSphere provides our customers with a sophisticated storage management solution that removes complexity from the mixed storage equation and helps customers achieve rapid benefits and returns," said Dr. Avi Katz, president and CEO of Intransa. "MonoSphere and Intransa are a logical fit for customers integrating IP storage into existing DAS environments."

Unlike typical alternative approaches which involve a highly disruptive and expensive "all or nothing" transition from DAS to FC-SAN architectures, MonoSphere and Intransa meet the challenges of DAS environments in a completely different way. MonoSphere Storage Manager (MSM) can be deployed with a pool of one or more Intransa IP5000s, priced under two cents per megabyte (MB). The software probes all storage volumes across the organization and makes intelligent decisions about where to best locate data based on actual, real-time usage patterns. "Cold" data blocks can be moved off DAS devices onto lower cost IP5000s freeing space on DAS devices for more effective use. As a result, DAS storage capacity utilization increases from the typical 40 to 50 percent to over 90 percent.

With MonoSphere, the IP5000 storage pool can be used for "spill over" when application data needs exceed the capacity of the DAS devices and/or to store the excess data generated during peak times. By implementing this architecture companies can reconfigure drives, add storage or migrate data from one server to another seamlessly with zero downtime and minimal administrative resources.

Further, using MonoSphere, data can be transparently staged to IP5000s for backup or replicated volumes. This enables low cost centralized backup and data protection, eliminates the need for expensive backup software on application servers, and avoids lock-in to proprietary vendor-specific data protection products.