Legato primes storage mgmt. software

Legato has introduced new software that lets network professionals more easily manage their storage resources and troubleshoot possible problems on their network-attached storage devices.

The company announced GEMS Storage Resource Manager (SRM) and GEMS SRM for Exchange last week. The software packages manage the space on disk drives, RAID subsystems, and backup and recovery products for customers running network systems based on Windows NT, Linux and Unix. If disk space is low or problems occur in storage systems, the packages send alerts to SNMP management frameworks, including Computer Associates' Unicenter, Tivoli's Framework, Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and Bull OpenMaster. The idea is that customers could more quickly launch a programmed response to problems or dispatch technicians to fix a problem in a more timely manner.

Legato is tapping a hot area. Dataquest of Stamford, Conn., estimates that the market for storage management software will hit $4.8 billion by 2002. Storage resource management products are also sold by Highground Systems, CA, Sun, IBM and BMC Software. Microsoft has also built SRM into Windows 2000 as the Microsoft Removable Storage Manager.

Legato claims its products are different from the competition in that GEMS can manage an entire network's storage resources rather than only those of a specific server or application.

"Storage has become a massive management burden, and SRM will help even novice administrators control, visualize and troubleshoot problem areas quickly and easily," says Steve Duplessie, an analyst with Enterprise Storage Group in Milford, Mass. "SRM lets companies significantly lessen the overall manpower required to manage large distributed storage environments by as much as 75%."

Duplessie estimates that SRM will let a single administrator handle four times the standard amount of administrative tasks.

Legato's GEMS SRM can manage the storage resources for all storage on a network. Residing on a Windows NT, Linux or Unix server, SRM lets a storage administrator back up and archive data, and analyze, configure and optimize the use of storage resources. The product works by measuring capacity and monitoring the availability of storage resources and reporting the information to the storage administrator.

"Companies who implement solid SRM packages will typically be able to find at least 10% of their current disk space is wasted and be able to reclaim it. If an organization has 2 terabytes, that's like getting a free 200G bytes of disk space back," Duplessie says. SRM spots areas of a disk that are redundant or unused over a certain period of time.

GEMS SRM for Exchange provides reports, alerts, trends and policies needed to manage capacity, consumption and availability for Microsoft Exchange Server storage. Running on the Exchange server, GEMS maps the Exchange topology, identifying the location of message stores and servers, and assists in the management of mailboxes, mailbox quotas, public folders and users.

GEMS SRM and SRM for Exchange store information in a Microsoft SQL Server database, and that information is accessible from any Web browser.

Legato GEMS SRM costs $4,000 for the GEMS SRM server and $1,150 per connection to a managed system. Legato GEMS SRM for Exchange will be available next month. Pricing has not been established.

Legato: www.legato.com.