Features - Storage Innovations:

ONARO BREAKS SAN BARRIER BY SOLVING COMPLEXITY CRISIS

Onaro introduced SANscreen predictive change management software that solves the complexity crisis once precluding organizations from changing and growing Storage Area Networks (SANs) quickly and accurately. With 80 percent of SAN availability problems and brownouts resulting from SAN changes, change management is by far the greatest challenge in building and maintaining increasingly complex SANs.

SANscreen provides companies with a higher level of SAN availability and takes the guesswork out of managing SAN changes through its unique simulation and root-cause analysis features that monitor millions of configuration states.

SANscreen enables enterprises to change and grow complex SANs quickly to meet business needs and attain high availability, performance and security. The software provides unprecedented visibility into, and understanding of, the complex myriad of access paths, relationships and interdependencies within a SAN. SANscreen will help IT guard their essential SANs from crippling downtime and security breaches. SANscreen also records all change events, enabling full audit and regulatory compliance.

"The promise of SANs can now be fulfilled since the constraints to change and growth have been lifted," says Onaro CEO Shai Scharf. "Manual methods and existing applications fail to comprehend and manage the millions of access paths found in today's storage networks." Scharf emphasizes that SANscreen complements all Storage Resource Management tools - software focused on provisioning and other functions. "SANscreen allows IT organizations to do much more with their existing resources, at least doubling the amount of storage that an administrator can manage," Scharf says.

"We are having incredible success, since companies immediately perceive the value of SANscreen from their first demo through proof of concept," added Scharf. The company will move to larger Boston headquarters this fall as it continues to hire in all areas including development. In future product releases, Onaro will apply its predictive algorithms and root-cause analysis on other applications such as backup, NAS and iSCSI.

According to Storage Vice President Ray Paquet at Gartner, Inc., "Storage management technology that proactively provides impact analysis of SAN changes and advice on addressing these changes will help to eliminate unplanned storage downtime while improving staff productivity." In addition, Gartner maintains that root-cause analysis is the "IT Holy Grail" - the most important function needed for SAN change management.

State Street Global Advisors (SSgA), the world's largest institutional asset manager with $1.2 trillion in assets under management, is one of Onaro's flagship customers. "SSgA's primary concerns in changing and growing SANs are stability and availability," said Robert Shinn, SSgA principal. "Our central business focus is the end-user service level and the cost to provide support. These areas are too varied and complex to achieve success through manual means, i.e. spreadsheets. An automated process that constantly monitors the state of the SAN and anticipates problems and vulnerabilities before they occur is the best vehicle for achieving the appropriate level of service our businesses require."

Scharf hopes to position SANscreen as the de facto standard for mastering SAN change and growth. "We want IT to experience the tremendous function and benefits of SANscreen so we've packaged the solution in a way that is affordable, easy and fast to install, non invasive and risk free."