The latest version of Aptare's backup tool supports backup software from EMC, Symantec and IBM, representing 90 percent of the backup market.Aptare has announced its newest version of its flagship backup reporting tool with support for two major backup products and enhanced reporting features.
With the release of StorageConsole 6.0, Aptare has completed support for the trifecta of major enterprise backup products.
The product now supports EMC NetWorker, in addition to previously announced support for Symantec NetBackup and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.
By supporting the three major backup and recovery vendors, Aptare president Richard Clark said that the Campbell, Calif., companys product now supports more than 90 percent of the backup market.
This release also supports Symantec Backup Exec, aimed at the small and midsize business and remote office environment, Clark said.
Also new in version 6.0 are a series of new dashboards and reports around lifecycle reporting for backups.
"With the advent of disk to disk to tape [D2D2Tape] technology, a piece of data that moves from your backup infrastructure to disk and then gets copied off to tape, and then taken to a vault, is very volatile," Clark said.
To address this issue, StorageConsole 6.0s life-cycle reporting reports on all of the changes to data over the course of its life, including utilization metrics, performance metrics and capacity metrics, both real-time and historical, as well as future forecasting and predictive analysis as the data moves from disk to disk to tape.
"It will show you in real-time the actual capacity and utilization of the disks used for D2D2Tape backup," he said.
The newest version of StorageConsole also offers something the company called application backup intelligence.
"A lot of companies have Oracle, Exchange or SQL Server, and this feature allows StorageConsole to aggregate the hundreds of jobs associated with those applications into a synchronized dashboard, with a view that shows the aggregate result at an application level," Clark said.
Other new features of StorageConsole 6.0 include user-definable backup windows, which allow organizations to define their own 24-hour windows, and the ability to identify specifically which tapes are required for restore jobs at the moment in time when the restore job is initiated.
Although these advances help the product remain competitive with its rivals, including WysDM, its main value is to enterprises with a mix of vendor products and applications, said Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting of Beaverton, Ore.
Aptare confronts competitors with data protection upgrade. Click here to read more.
"Typically, enterprises use one vendor for disk to disk and another for tape. They might be using NetApp for D2D and EMC NetWorker to go from the NetApp system to a tape system, for example," he said.
"In that case, something like this could be useful to standardize and provide a window into the entire process."
The same is true for the products application backup intelligence feature.
"Oracle has a phenomenal backup product built into Oracle 10g Enterprise, with probably the most complete CDP of any Ive seen on the market—but it only works for Oracle. If youre not an Oracle shop and use other things as well, StorageConsole would be useful," Staimer said.
Continuing its quest to become the tool of choice, Aptare plans early in 2007 to announce support for both CommVault and HP Data Protector.
The company will continue to enhance the product, with a key focus around simplifying the user interface and creating more actionable dashboards, real-time monitoring and alerting, Clark said.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.
Data Storage, Data Backup and Storage Virtualization 
