Special Section: SNW, Fall 2004 - More News From SNW:

AppIQ Expands Scalability, Scope Of Storage Area Management

AppIQ Inc announced a new release of its award-winning storage area network (SAN) management and storage resource management (SRM) solution family. To meet customer demand for highly scalable management of multi-vendor storage infrastructures, AppIQ StorageAuthority Suite R3.6 can be hosted on Sun's Solaris Operating Environment and Microsoft Windows Server 2003, offers a multi-site rollup option for enterprises that require a centralized view of distributed data center storage, and adds scalability enhancements that enable SANs with thousands of ports to be managed from a single management server. To give customers more flexibility in selecting the storage hardware that is the best fit for their businesses and budgets, AppIQ StorageAuthority Suite R3.6 is the first management solution to support Hitachi's new TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform and Sun's full range of storage products, and integrates with more hosts, fabric switches and storage systems from Cisco, CNT, HP and QLogic.

With this latest release, AppIQ's storage area management product family continues to distinguish itself as the premier solution for IT organizations that need to exceed service levels, reduce operational costs, increase efficiency, and synchronize storage infrastructure with on-demand business initiatives.

The following capabilities are new in AppIQ StorageAuthority R3.6:

• Management server support for Sun's Solaris Operating Environment and Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

• StorageAuthority Global Reporter module, which provides rollup reporting of multiple StorageAuthority Server instances for centralized management of distributed data center storage.

• Numerous scalability and performance enhancements designed to increase the number of hosts, storage ports, and elements that can be discovered and synchronized using a single StorageAuthority Server, including device-specific timeouts, data streaming, and more efficient memory utilization and caching.

• Managed host support for the HP-UX operating system.

• Managed host support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

• Managed storage system support for the recently introduced Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform. AppIQ leveraged its strategic OEM relationship with HDS in delivering the first management solution that monitors, reports on, and provisions this innovative, enterprise-class storage system.

• Managed storage system support for Sun StorEdge 6920 and 3510 storage systems. AppIQ leveraged its strategic OEM relationship with Sun Microsystems in delivering the first management solution that monitors, reports on, and provisions Sun's full line of Workgroup, Midrange, and Data Center storage products, and integrates with Sun Traffic Manager and Sun Volume Manager software.

• Managed storage system support for HP StorageWorks XP disk arrays.

• Managed fabric switch support for Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer SAN Switches.

• Managed fabric switch support for CNT FC/9000 Fibre Channel/FICON Director.

• Managed fabric switch support for QLogic SANbox Fibre Channel switches.

"With this release, AppIQ is raising the bar on scalability and performance, and giving customers more options to centrally manage large, distributed storage infrastructure," said David Chang, vice president of product management at AppIQ. "Our Web services-based platform can now manage even larger SANs from a single instance, reducing hardware and administration costs and overall total cost of ownership. At the same time, our new Global Reporter module gives enterprises that implement more than one management server the big picture view of their end-to-end storage infrastructure. Plus, we continue to take advantage of our strategic OEM relationships to be first-to-market with important new features."