Wang Unveils Open/Stor Industry's First Open Storage Management Software For Microsoft Windows Nt

Business Wire, Sept 17, 1996

ATLANTA, Ga.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--September 17, 1996--Wang (NASDAQ:WANG) today, at the Networld Interop show, unveiled OPEN/stor, the industry's first open storage management software for Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0. Wang Software now offers Windows NT platform users the same award-winning hierarchical storage management (HSM) technology which has long dominated the NetWare market.

OPEN/stor increases LAN administrator productivity, significantly reduces costs associated with storing massive amounts of data throughout the enterprise, and expands the amount of on-line storage available on the Windows NT platform. This gives end-users immediate, reliable access to large amounts of data, regardless of where the files are stored. OPEN/stor for Windows NT uses a multi-layer secondary storage hierarchy, migrating seldom-used files to lower levels of the hierarchy, freeing space on costly primary disk storage for frequently-accessed files. OPEN/stor is being launched concurrently with Microsoft's Windows NT Server 4.0 at Networld Interop.

"We're excited that Windows NT Server users will now be able to take advantage of Wang's powerful HSM technology," said Mike Nash, director of marketing at Microsoft. "OPEN/stor will give our customers a cost-effective, reliable means to store and manage all of their files, regardless of their type or location."

About OPEN/stor

OPEN/stor allows Windows NT network administrators to manage large amounts of data on multiple servers, and make it quickly and easily accessible to large groups of user. Through its sophisticated disaster recovery scheme, OPEN/stor ensures that in case of hardware failure or disaster, the data is quickly and reliably retrieved. OPEN/stor also gives LAN administrators the ability to quickly grow the amount of data, with minimal manual effort and little or no downtime.

OPEN/stor provides administrators with a full-featured graphical interface to easily configure secondary storage devices, add media to those devices, schedule and define migration and recall jobs, generate file or volume level reports, select and configure Windows NT Servers for storage management, and perform disaster recovery operations. The administrator interface can be run on any Windows NT Workstation or Server, and can be used to administer several OPEN/stor servers.

"OPEN/stor is a significant milestone in our commitment to the Windows NT platform, delivering a powerful, open, standards-based storage management solution to the marketplace," said Fred Richardson, general manager, Wang Software Storage Management Group. "We will continue to evolve with market demands, and we are currently working with Microsoft as a co-development partner to create an HSM product for the next major release of Windows NT, ensuring that OPEN/stor customers have a seamless upgrade path to the next NT environment."

Industry Support

OPEN/stor supports most of the industry's major SCSI magneto-optical disk jukeboxes and 4mm, 8mm and DLT libraries, including devices from Hewlett-Packard, Exabyte, Quantum, Sony, ATL Products, Plasmon, and Seagate.

Enterprise-wide connectivity to IBM's Adstar Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM) resources is supported through the optional OPEN/stor ADSM Capacity License. These modules allow data on Windows NT Servers to be migrated to a centralized glass house via TCP/IP, IPX/SPX or SNA LU6. The benefits of this added functionality are heightened data accessibility and substantial cost savings through the utilization of centralized corporate storage hardware.

Significant Cost Savings

Strategic Research, a leading storage analyst firm in Santa Barbara, California, puts the annual cost of managing information on LANs at more than $6 per megabyte. Cost analysis performed by Strategic Research calculated the annual cost savings with HSM for a network storage site with 200 gigabytes of capacity at more than $190,000. In addition to the hardware cost savings, OPEN/stor can reduce storage administrative costs by 60 percent or more.

OPEN/stor generates cost savings by automating the migration and recall of files between the primary and secondary storage systems. OPEN/stor can be installed on any available Windows NT server, but for maximum network performance, a dedicated OPEN/stor HSM server is recommended. A single OPEN/stor NT server can manage multiple Windows NT servers and workstations.

Enterprise Work Management

OPEN/stor is a powerful standalone storage management product, as well as the latest addition to Wang's Enterprise Work Management portfolio, consisting of OPEN/image, OPEN/workflow, OPEN/cold and Imaging for Windows 95 and Windows NT. As a component of Wang's Work Management solutions, OPEN/stor provides customers with a powerful, industry-standard mechanism for managing the large amounts of data that complementary work management applications produce.

Pricing and Availability

OPEN/stor will be available within 60 days from Wang's salesforce, resellers and distributors worldwide. Pricing for OPEN/stor begins at $2,995 and varies from there according to data storage requirements.