Features - Storage Innovations:

CNT SOFTWARE CUTS DOWNTIME BY FINDING, REPORTING GLITCHES

CNT, a global expert in storage networking solutions, announced the availability of the inVSN (pronounced In-Vision) family of storage network software solutions that facilitate the management of an enterprise's entire SAN, MAN and WAN infrastructure. Businesses can now see their entire global storage infrastructure in a single view, pro-actively collect network performance data, identify potential problem areas and correlate those problems back to the affected application, increasing data availability and reducing the time required to diagnose and resolve problems.

The CNT inVSN management software uses open, standard interfaces that can manage multiple product lines and protocols. Unique capabilities include:

• A graphical view of a storage application's end-to-end data path across various networks (including MAN and WAN), sites, and protocols
• The ability to collect network performance data and monitor against user-set thresholds to ensure the Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• An immediate correlation between infrastructure state and application behavior
• Actionable knowledge instead of meaningless network alerts from the enterprise management framework.

"One of the key issues with network management solutions is that they are limited in their ability to see across varying network topologies. Organizations will invest heavily in network management frameworks, only to find that they can not correlate information across MAN, SAN, WAN and mainframe networks," said Nancy Marrone-Hurley, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. "CNT's inVSN is unique in its ability to visualize and correlate network information across multiple topologies. No other solution can give users this type of insight to issues across their entire enterprise infrastructure."

"We are leveraging CNT's unique ability to connect remote end-to-end solutions across both the local and wide area networks," said Jack Domme, vice president of Software at Hitachi Data Systems. "By using CNT's technology in our HiCommand Framework, our customers can now manage their entire storage infrastructure -- from the storage on one side, over the WAN, to the storage on the other side -- all from a single location."

"It doesn't matter what equipment, protocols or infrastructure managers are using in their storage network," said Ed Walsh, vice president of marketing, alliances and strategy at CNT. "Our new inVSN management software makes it much easier to design, implement, manage and troubleshoot your entire storage network environment, regardless of where that storage is located. For over twenty years, CNT has been building and using tools for remote monitoring and management. We've applied that expertise to storage since 1997. Now, for the first time, we are offering these tools and proven methodologies to customers for deployment at their own facilities. We are also offering customers a variety of ways to analyze storage network information. By being able to view an entire storage application, customers can troubleshoot network issues ahead of time so that they can take action and avoid outages altogether. This 'proactive, rather than reactive' approach means less time and money spent on managing storage network problems."