In the category of 'just because you haven’t heard about them, doesn’t mean they don’t exist,' is Gresham Enterprise Storage.

The company, headquartered in Austin, Texas, and founded in 1998, has two products – Gresham Enterprise Distributape (EDT) and Gresham Virtual Tape Library (VTL). The company claims that even though not many people are familiar with its products, it has more than 300 customers of its EDT product.

Gresham EDT works in Tivoli Storage Manager environments, where it fits between TSM and Sun/StorageTek’s ACSLS Management Software. It enhances the capabilities of TSM by creating a consolidated drive pool that can be shared by multiple TSM servers and clients. EDT also enables the sharing of tape libraries between mainframe and open systems clients. In addition it automates media management and reporting capabilities.

Gresham also makes VTL software, an area that has had much interest in the past year. The company is going to introduce Version 2 of its VTL product sometime in the next few months. They wouldn’t tell me what its new features are going to be, but stay tuned.

Gresham’s VTL can be used in open systems and mainframe environments. It works with any backup application, tape drive and media type.

The company was founded by a group of AIX kernel developers as Open Microsystems. Gresham has 150 employees, 50 of whom are dedicated to storage.

Storage in the news:

* For info on what companies such as Symantec and IBM are doing to promote their products, read “10 Free Storage Utilities".

* Nexsan introduced an appliance that not only encrypts, replicates and tiers data, but archives it as well.

* More data breach shenanigans have been uncovered at TJX.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.