Compaq takes bigger stake in
enterprise storage nets
CMP Media Inc. - Saturday, December 04, 1999
Dec. 03, 1999 (Electronic Engineering Times - CMP via COMTEX) -- HOUSTON -
Compaq Computer Corp. has beefed up its efforts in enterprise storage, investing
$20 million in HighGround Systems Inc., a five-year-old company that makes
management software for storage-area networks.
SANs are becoming a major technical force for large operations, providing a way for
companies to blend various hosts and storage subsystems like disk arrays.
Compaq's minority investment in HighGround is the company's second step recently
to address this growing market. A couple of months ago, Compaq formed an
operation dedicated to SANs: the Enterprise Storage Software group.
"People will be connecting arrays from various companies to multiple hosts," said
Mark Lewis, vice president of Compaq ESS. "This will be a fact of life in how
customers employ SANs. One key thing we feel customers need is storage
resource-management software, which lets [them] plan for changing capacity
requirements and [helps them to] manage their storage so they can achieve the
lowest cost."
Compaq will now be the largest outside shareholder in HighGround (Marlboro,
Mass.). HighGround makes Web-engineered software tools that let storage
managers control various storage configurations. Originally, the software was written
for NT systems, but Unix and Linux have been added, according to Tom Rose,
HighGround's marketing vice president.
"What HighGround's storage resource-management software does is to manage
software with an agent placed on every host," Lewis said. "This agent queries for the
location of files, the age of files, to see if some are stale. It also looks at capacity
utilization, and sees how much certain files are used. It lets managers do more
planning to make better use of their assets."
Compaq thinks that over the past year or so, the infrastructure for SANs has come
online, and the SAN market is now set for a major market breakthrough.
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