Tmaster. Highground got it's start with $$ from MSFT,Compaq,BRCD....
As part of a $30 million round of investment funding, HighGround has announced new partnerships focused on investment and technology development with Brocade, COMPAQ, Legato, and Network Appliance. COMPAQ's significant investment portion of $20 million is indicative of the compelling value that industry-leading storage vendors see in HighGround technology. HighGround will continue to announce additional major investors and partners that will further entrench SRM solutions within emerging any-to-any storage technologies. These partnership companies are leaders in delivering the core components of enterprise storage infrastructure, which characterize the New Enterprise.
HighGround is also active in storage area networking standards bodies such as the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).
THeir BRCD ties probaly was why their are pr pieces like this....
SANs and NAS
New Version of Storage Resource Manager Supports Storage Networking Solutions from Brocade and Network Appliance
MARLBOROUGH, Mass., September 26, 2000 - HighGround® Systems, Inc., the leading developer of storage resource management software for open systems, today announced Global Storage Resource Manager™ (SRM™) 4.0, a comprehensive family of solutions for managing storage resources in today's complex enterprises. SRM 4.0 delivers extended management views of Brocade® (NasdaqNM: BRCD) Fibre Channel fabric switch-based storage area networks (SANs) through the SRM Enterprise Edition, and of Network Appliance™ (NasdaqNM: NTAP) network attached storage (NAS) filers through the SRM Enterprise Edition for NetApp® (see separate release issued today). The new release also includes SRM Exchange Edition, an enhanced version of SRM for Exchange that offers additional functionality to manage the increasing storage requirements associated with e-mail messages and attachments.
"Today's enterprise storage infrastructures are becoming increasingly more complex, which places storage resource management software in a more pivotal role," said Steve Widen, director of storage software research for IDC. "By offering a vendor-independent, open solution, HighGround's SRM software distinguishes itself from other providers. The company's partnerships with Network Appliance and Brocade reinforce its commitment to provide solutions for key storage infrastructures such as NAS and SAN," Widen concluded.
HighGround's family of SRM solutions is expanding to support a wide range of storage technologies, applications and databases, and enterprise storage planning and management concerns. SRM provides IT with a knowledgebase that facilitates the planning, design and implementation of storage infrastructures. Additionally, SRM enables IT organizations to establish effective, repeatable storage management best practices that minimize risk, maximize the utilization of storage investments, and improve operational efficiencies.
"With over 50 offices across more than 37 countries and six continents, our storage requirements are considerable," said Ian Saggers, director of global engineering for Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), a leading investment banking firm. "HighGround SRM has had, and will continue to have, a major impact on the design and planning of CSFB's extensive storage networking architecture."
SRM 4.0 answers the demand for effective storage resource management solutions. The following factors will contribute to the growing reliance on SRM:
Explosive storage growth - Researchers predict that by 2003, the average-size business will be storing more than 100 terabytes of data.
Increasing storage costs - Today storage costs account for 50 percent or more of the total cost of a server; this percentage will continue to rise.
The growing SAN/NAS markets - Last year SAN market spending amounted to $1 billion; that number will exceed $10 billion by 2003. The NAS market will grow to over six billion within three years.
Demanding availability requirements - New technologies combined with the need to support 24x7 service and strict service level agreements are fueling data growth.
With the release of this new version, HighGround SRM will be restructured to provide more focus to individual technologies and applications. Two suites will be offered initially, the Infrastructure Suite and the Application Suite. The Infrastructure Suite supports investments in enterprise storage infrastructures and currently includes the SRM Enterprise Edition and the SRM Enterprise Edition for NetApp. The Application Suite will provide storage-centric viewing, analysis and alerting of critical storage intensive applications; SRM Exchange Edition is a member of this suite and will be joined by SRM SQL Server Edition and SRM Oracle® Edition next year. An additional suite, the Solution Suite, will be added next year to increase support for the tactical and strategic business problems associated with deploying and managing storage architectures.
Partnerships Key to Delivery of Expanded SRM Vision
SRM 4.0 brings to fruition the partnerships announced earlier this year with Brocade and Network Appliance. Both partnerships have resulted in the delivery of a critical component of HighGround's vision of end-to-end storage resource management within any-to-any architectures.
"We approached Brocade and Network Appliance with a clear understanding of what they could bring to the table," said HighGround CEO Dennis Grant. "It was important to establish relationships up front with the industry leaders - we could reach more customers that way. But our goal is to expand the SRM network to include every element in any customer's storage infrastructure, and we're well on our way," Grant concluded.
Brocade Fibre Channel fabric switches connect servers with storage devices through a SAN, allowing companies to access and share storage in a scalable, highly available and high-performance environment. "As the leading provider of SAN infrastructure, Brocade is pleased to work with HighGround to ensure that our market-leading products are manageable through HighGround's SRM," said Jack Cuthbert, Brocade vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "As SANs continue to expand in size and complexity, the combination of centralized storage resource management solutions such as HighGround's SRM and the Brocade networking foundation for storage will further simplify SAN deployment and management for our mutual customers."
NetApp file storage appliances, also known as "filers," attach directly to a network to deliver fast, simple, reliable and cost-effective access to stored data. "HighGround SRM solutions provide our customers with a unique, centralized view of their NetApp filers and the ability to automate storage monitoring, reporting and policy management," said Mark Santora, senior vice president of Network Appliance. "These capabilities empower IT organizations to optimize NetApp filer implementations and consequently reduce the total cost of storage ownership and maximize the return on investment."
New Platform Support and Technology Enhancements
SRM 4.0 adds support for several platforms including Windows 2000 for SRM Server, Tru64 UNIX 4.0F and 5.1, and NetWare 4.2 and 5.1. The new version of SRM also offers enhanced support for Windows 2000 File System attributes and Microsoft Clusters.
SRM Facilitates NetWare Migration to High-Availability Storage Infrastructures
With the addition of support for NetWare, SRM becomes a valuable solution for IT managers tasked with migrating NetWare file and print architectures to more highly-available storage infrastructures like SANs and NAS. Before selecting the new storage architecture, IT managers must take steps to measure the rate of data growth, backup all existing data, and identify and archive or delete stale data. SRM facilitates this process by automating the discovery and profiling of enterprise-wide NetWare environments. Once SRM has analyzed the existing environment and fully quantified key data trends, IT managers can take actions appropriate to their phased migration strategy.
Pricing and Availability
The good part is they will know how to manage heterogeneous environments, the paranoid SI folks will wnat some reassurance that there are no BRCD strings on this deal going to the SUNW. Thestreet.com jput in bold letters the ties to BRCD and NTAP. Are the strings cut now? Any help out there on this issue..Any impact on Q/SUNW because of this deal? Thanks in advance for any help.
They are at this Gartner COnference now...
Gartner's 19th annual Data Center conference
December 4-6, 2000
Desert Springs Marriott Resort and Spa
Palm Desert, CA |
