Creekpath Launches Acuity: First Business Management Solution for Enterprise Storage Infrastructure

Market Wire, April, 2006

Creekpath(TM), the first vendor to create an intelligent analytical and business management framework for enterprise storage assets, today unveiled Creekpath Acuity™, a next-generation information technology (IT) asset and service management solution for data storage infrastructure. Creekpath Acuity is the first solution to align storage-related metrics and business concerns, helping IT executives mitigate the risk of misconfigured networks or capacity shortages, while avoiding unnecessary spending and dramatically raising return on assets.

"The time is long overdue for a vendor to provide visibility and insight into the storage environment, and present a business-relevant view of what is really happening. IT executives are business people who need to know in concrete terms the return on storage assets, not how many I/Os a second a particular box can run," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Creekpath's vision for business analytics on top of the vast wasteland of storage components provides a ray of hope that IT executives can actually accomplish the holy grail of clearly seeing storage through a business lens."

"Traditional storage resource management (SRM) software is targeted solely at the needs of storage administrators; at best, it can save corporations hundreds of thousands of dollars. In stark contrast, Creekpath Acuity saves millions of dollars per year by improving the quality of business decisions made by IT executives who are accountable for budget and service delivery," said Mark Davis, president and CEO of Creekpath. "Acuity brings into sharp focus the business issues that CIOs, CFOs, infrastructure VPs, architects, and capacity planners grapple with, delivering for the first time a solution that brings storage to the business table."

About Creekpath Acuity

Studies show that one third or more of IT budgets are directly related to data storage, yet corporations consistently underutilize storage resources, make ill-timed and unnecessary purchases, while struggling to tie consumption of finite and expensive infrastructure to the profitability business units they support. Creekpath Acuity uses advanced analytic technology to deliver a single, authoritative version of enterprise storage supply and demand. This gives business managers full visibility into complex storage networks and enables IT executives to have fact-based, business conversations with their customers about asset investments and how they contribute to corporate profitability.

Designed for heterogeneous environments, Creekpath Acuity supports major storage infrastructure components and vendors through open industry-standard SMI-S and proprietary storage vendor interfaces. Customers can deploy Creekpath Acuity in days, quickly gaining immediate savings through the identification of underutilized and orphaned storage resources, resulting in millions of dollars in potential savings.

Creekpath Acuity builds on the proven success of the Creekpath SRM software suite, which is currently used by Fortune 1000 companies and global IT service providers to simplify and automate complex storage operations and improve service levels in some of the world's largest storage networks. It delivers new functionality in the following areas:

--  Business Intelligence: Creekpath Acuity provides visibility and
    transparency into complex storage environments with more than 200 pre-
    built, configurable analytic templates which drive discussions between
    business and IT about storage costs, consumption, and supply planning.
    Management can for the first time understand total storage spending by
    region, business unit, or other factor. IT can reclaim storage, better
    plan, and identify storage resource consumers for accurate chargeback. Cost-
    reducing tiered storage strategies can be tracked and improved by comparing
    the existing infrastructure to targeted service and utilization levels.
    Creekpath Acuity also includes metrics and analysis specific to IT service
    management, to ensure service level agreements are met, while providing a
    framework for improving service levels and supporting other IT
    Infrastructure Library (ITIL) initiatives.

--  CMDB for the storage infrastructure: Acuity enables IT managers to
    create an enterprise-wide storage configuration management database (CMDB),
    with information about assets, usage, and end-to-end application dependency
    maps. An open database allows integration from the Creekpath Acuity
    database to other management software, enabling companies to consolidate,
    reconcile, and analyze supply/demand trends for all storage assets,
    regardless of where they are located.

--  Agentless Discovery: Using sophisticated agentless technology, Acuity
    unobtrusively discovers and maps storage assets to specific business
    applications, providing a complete and dynamic picture of available and
    used storage capacity while correlating storage assets to how they are
    used. Across all major vendors, Creekpath Acuity discovers the most
    detailed storage supply chain possible from databases, file systems, volume
    managers, server virtualization, multi-pathing drivers, servers, fabric
    switches, storage virtualization, array controllers, RAID software, all the
    way down to the drives.