W. Quinn Upgrades StorageCeNTral

ENT, March 26, 2001

W. Quinn Associates announced the latest update of its StorageCeNTral storage resource management suite for Windows NT/2000 last month at the MCP TechMentor Conference in Orlando, Fla.

StorageCeNTral 4.1 increased scalability for large enterprise SANs and data center environments. The new release also includes support for Microsoft Active Directory, among other new performance enhancements.

The upgrade provides storage administrators with more than 4.5-times greater processing speed, improved communication efficiency, and better manageability of users' shared storage resources. Aimed at the enterprise environment, the release was developed as part of W. Quinn's ongoing relationship with Microsoft.

StorageCeNTral 4.1 goes beyond setting quotas on storage, says Steven Toole, vice president of marketing at W. Quinn. It does, however, use the company's QuotaAdvisor software to provide administrators with 35 standard, Web-based utilization reports. Users can reclaim 30 to 50 percent of wasted storage resources by identifying obsolete and irrelevant data residing on their servers, Toole says.

StorageCeNTral 4.1 has trending reports as well so administrators can watch storage growth over time and make decisions about capacity requirements.

The new StorageCeNTral delivers W. Quinn's five-tiered approach to storage management, what it terms AASET: audit, allocate, screen, educate, and trend. Auditing involves reporting what is on today's servers that causes them to be full. Allocating entails giving network users reasonable amounts of disk space in which to perform their jobs. Screening covers screening out unwanted file types. Educating users on proper storage usage via HTML reports is key, Toole emphasizes. Finally, trending involves tracking the network's storage usage over time.

The TruStor I/O Quota Filter Driver processes data transfers 4.5-times faster than StorageCeNTral's previous releases. In large SANs, it is necessary to prevent users from going over their storage quotas, Toole says. As each file writes to the server, it passes through the I/O filter. Because the filter sees files in real-time, rather than at a scheduled archive time, the effect is analogous to an anti-virus filter, Toole says. It is virtually unnoticed when it runs constantly in the background.

Robert Gray, research director for storage systems at IDC, says storage resource management is taking off as a market because administrators want the benefits of storage in a networked environment, and they need management software that provides the monitoring ability. Gray says the current market space is focused on monitoring, but it should evolve into administrators being able to set network storage policies soon.

Gray sees the expansion of the SRM market as inevitable. "Given that the hardware sector of the market is growing rapidly, the software management portion of it has to grow equally. The market for policy-based management tools will have to increase. The demand is growing."