StorageTek Snaps Up Storability

StorageTek took another step in filling out its information
lifecycle management portfolio this week, acquiring software maker
Storability.

The companies did not disclose financial terms of the agreement, but StorageTek purchased all intellectual
property, software license agreements and 40 customer contracts of
Storability. Some 70 employees will join StorageTek, remaining in
Storability’s Southborough, Mass., headquarters and at the offices in India.

Storability makes Global Storage Manager (GSM), a software product that
enables customers to improve the use of their storage environments by
offering a centralized view of near-line storage, network fabric and
switches, databases and backup applications.

GSM is also valuable for customers with heterogeneous storage infrastructure,
because it manages thousands of storage components from several different
vendors across large enterprises. The latest version of GSM, 4.0, provides
business analytics that improve a user’s ability to gauge data.

“GSM does a great job of attaching to primary storage arrays and identifying
under-partitioned storage space and utilizing that,” said Todd Rief,
director of corporate strategy for StorageTek. “We think conservatively that we
can free up a half to a third of people’s primary storage assets with this
tool.”

Rief told internetnews.com owning the roadmap for Storability’s
products will aid StorageTek’s ability to support the customers.

The product falls under the increasingly popular niche of storage resource
management (SRM) software, which analysts say is a growing market, led by
giants such as EMC and Veritas Software. According to research from IDC, SRM represents the largest
functional market of storage software, growing more than 30 percent year
over year.

“Effective storage resource management is the foundation for delivering an
efficient, reliable, and highly available storage infrastructure …” said
IDC analyst Bill North in a recent market report. “Device and SAN management
software use grew by 36 percent compared with the second quarter of 2003.”

Rief said the purchase is a natural fit because StorageTek and Storability
have worked together for more than two years. StorageTek acquired
Storability’s Storage Operations Center (SOC) in July 2002, using it to
launch its remote managed storage service offering. StorageTek has since
been Storability’s leading reseller.

For StorageTek, well-known in the storage space for its tape back-up
prowess, the ability to completely integrate SRM offerings into its product
line pads its ILM strategy for managing content from the time it’s created
until its disposal.

Rief said Storability helps StorageTek’s ILM strategy, because it bolsters
the productivity of primary storage, makes data protection processes more
reliable and less labor intensive, and facilitates archive and compliance
systems.

Many storage vendors, including EMC, IBM
and HP are hawking ILM as a key strategy to help customers
cope with mounting compliance regulations.