PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 2, 1999--
Legato Systems Outlines the Information Utility, Announces
Strategic Partnerships, and Demonstrates Storage Area
Network (SAN) Solutions
At a worldwide press conference held today, Legato Systems, Inc.
(NASDAQ:LGTO), a leader in the enterprise storage management software
market, detailed its roadmap and partnerships designed to advance
storage networking toward the vision of the Information Utility.
"Our enterprise customers rely on their information systems just
as much as they rely on their electrical and telephone systems," said
Lou Cole, chief executive officer of Legato Systems, Inc. "Those
utilities provide seamless, uninterrupted access to their services,
managed in a way that is transparent to the customer. Similarly,
Legato's storage management products will enable Storage Area Networks
to provide uninterrupted availability of data, managed in a way that
is transparent to the user, thus creating the Information Utility."
The Information Utility will enable enterprises to achieve robust
data protection, high data accessibility, and continuous operations in
SAN environments. These benefits will be provided through the
application of efficient resource utilization, service level
availability management, SAN-based data movement, and self-healing
storage techniques in a policy-managed framework. Legato's
announcement today outlined products, initiatives, and partnerships
aimed at achieving these benefits in three important stages.
"Compaq plans to incorporate Legato's solutions to support the
Compaq Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA), which makes
storage a more flexible, shared resource throughout an enterprise,"
said Darren Thomas, vice president of the Multi-Vendor Business Unit
of Compaq Computer Corporation's Storage Products Division. "Compaq is
a leader in the market with high-performance, fully configured SAN
storage solutions. By working together with partners such as Legato,
we offer fully automated SAN solutions that give customers the ability
to achieve increasing levels of return from storage in heterogeneous
environment."
"CLARiiON and Legato are working closely together to deliver
backup and recover solutions that will deliver uninterrupted access to
data and applications," said Mark Vargo, director of solutions
marketing at CLARiiON. "This alliance can help customers realize
benefits from their SAN implementation in a much shorter timeframe."
In the first stage, fairly simple SAN environments are created to
solve specific storage management problems, such as more efficient use
of network resources and management of application availability. For
these customers, Legato NetWorker today can provide LAN-free backup
for mission-critical database and application servers, with Legato
SmartMedia(R) providing the added benefit of dynamic sharing of tape
drives across heterogeneous environments. Customers ready to deploy
these advanced capabilities can be assured of interoperability with
SAN hardware through the Legato SAN Ready program. In addition,
FullTime Cluster(TM) provides the ability to manage application
service levels, giving administrators the flexibility to minimize both
planned and unplanned system downtime.
"The combination of FullTime Cluster and FullTime Data with
Legato's enterprise storage management products brings unequaled
management capabilities to SAN environments today," said Dave
Malmstedt, senior vice president of worldwide operations at FullTime
Software. "As we work together to fully exploit SAN capabilities, we
will enable our customers to fully realize the incredible potential
that storage networking brings for improving their business
processes."
As SANs begin to mature and customers begin to deploy more
complex storage networks with increasingly intelligent storage
devices, the need for more efficient use of server resources and
transparent management of data protection processes will arise. Legato
is addressing this evolution by replacing the "host-centric" storage
management model with a "storage network-centric" model. Legato will
employ the Celestra(TM) architecture, which provides the industry's
first true server-less backup for the SAN market, gained in last
week's acquisition of Intelliguard Software. Celestra enables new
applications, such as server-less backup, SAN-based file replication
and mirroring, and transparent Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM).
Legato will work with other leading SAN vendors to deliver these
capabilities on intelligent storage platforms, creating key products
to manage the Information Utility.
"Celestra has reached the marketplace precisely as the market for
data movers is exploding," said George Wilson, chief executive officer
of Intelliguard Software. "Celestra will help optimize Fibre
Channel-based Storage Area Networks -- and help move this advanced
technology further into the enterprise, delivering the benefits of
standards-based, 'server-less' technology to the heterogeneous
environments of Fortune 2000 corporations. This is a huge and growing
opportunity. There are 300,000 corporate sites with over 200 gigabytes
of storage capacity, and the market for data movers is substantially
larger."
Finally, as SANs mature further, proactive management techniques
will be required to ensure SAN scalability and fully realize the
potential of the Information Utility. The self-healing storage
capabilities of Legato GEMS will be extended to the management of the
SAN network infrastructure. This will provide a policy-managed
framework for the management of both the SAN infrastructure and the
data contained in the SAN, giving administrators unprecedented control
over the quality of service provided by the storage network.
Providing comprehensive SAN solutions will require industry
leaders to work closely together. Today, Legato also announced
strategic partnerships with CLARiiON, the Advanced Storage Division of
Data General Corporation, a leading supplier of disk arrays for the
open systems market, and with Brocade Communications, the leader in
the Fibre Channel switch market. Like previously announced
relationships with 3Com Corporation and MTI, and StorageTek and Box
Hill, these partnerships are aimed at developing and bringing to
market solutions required by customers who are deploying SANs to
improve their business and data management processes. Refer to
separate announcements, "CLARiiON and Legato Systems Join Forces to
Speed the Deployment of SANs" and "Brocade and Legato Systems Partner
to Offer Integrated Storage Network Management," for more information
on these exciting strategic partnerships.
Legato also announced today that it has joined the FibreAlliance
as a charter member. Sponsored by EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the
FibreAlliance is a consortium of twelve Fibre Channel hardware and
management leaders. The goal of the FibreAlliance is to establish
standard methods for management of Fibre Channel-based SANs.
"Legato's product initiatives continually improve the data
protection, data availability, and operational transparency of our
customers' environments," said Nora M. Denzel, senior vice president
at Legato Systems, Inc. "Legato's concept of an Information Utility
takes early SAN solutions to the next level, where fault tolerant
storage operations ensure that management of storage is fully
automated and policy-driven for maximum customer return on their
storage investment. Legato is committed to developing solutions that
conform with industry standards, ensuring interoperability for our
customers."
"We have witnessed explosive data growth as the Internet has
become critical to daily business operations throughout the world,"
said Chris Gnanakone, president and chief executive officer, at
SeaLink Information Technologies, Inc. "Legato's concept of the
Information Utility provides end users improved access to this data
across their organization. This is critical to our e-commerce
applications. We look forward to seeing the SAN products that will
bring the benefits of the Information Utility to our business."
"The vision of enterprise SANs, providing universal access to
data, is solid and becoming a reality for the distributed network.
Underlying this robust storage network architecture is a sophisticated
management infrastructure comprising data movement, access, sharing,
performance, data protection, disaster tolerance, and quality of
service," said Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research
Corporation, Santa Barbara, California. "The strategy and roadmap that
Legato is announcing today will provide that sophisticated management,
exploiting the intelligence that will be distributed throughout the
storage network, and enabling customers to achieve the benefits of the
Information Utility."
Legato Certified SAN Solutions
Attendees at today's worldwide press conference also viewed live
demonstrations of Legato SAN solutions, featuring LAN-free backup and
restore in a heterogeneous environment, with Windows NT and UNIX hosts
connected to a tape library using Legato NetWorker Power Edition and
Legato SmartMedia. Demonstrations also included remote SAN backup,
using Legato NetWorker Power Edition backing up data via Fibre Channel
bridged over ATM; FullTime Cluster failover, with load-balancing
across multiple systems in a SAN environment; and server-less backup
using Intelliguard's Celestra architecture. Partners participating in
these demonstrations include ADIC, ATL Products, Brocade, CLARiiON,
Compaq, Computer Network Technology (CNT), Crossroads, Emulex,
Exabyte, FullTime, Gadzoox, Intelliguard, JNI, MTI, QLogic, Quantum,
Silicon Graphics, StorageTek, Sun, and Vixel.
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