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With most new storage software emphasizes agnostic management and virtual hardware pools, W. Quinn Inc.s new product emphasizes performance management and helps administrators deduce what storage to buy when expansion beckons.
SiteStor, available later this month for any Microsoft Corp. Windows and Sun Microsystems Inc. Solaris-based storage, and for Network Appliance Inc.s network-attached storage hardware, will be announced on Tuesday, said Najaf Husain, president of W. Quinn, the Reston, Va., subsidiary of Precise Software Solutions, in Westwood, Mass.
“Its much less tactical and more strategic. Why do I keep having to spend more money on storage; how do I answer that,” he said.
Through about 100 pre-configured reports, SiteStor baselines whats already in place, determines which applications use it and notes the capacities and application growth rates. Then, “you can relate this stuff to your business priorities,” Husain said.
W. Quinn, meanwhile, is one of two companies supplying storage software to Microsoft, for use in the Redmond, Wash., companys Server Appliance Kit 2.0. The other is PowerQuest Corp., of Orem, Utah. Its likely that SiteStors underlying technology will trickle into future versions of SAK and even of Windows itself, Husain said.
“Thats our goal,” he said. “I believe it does not [conflict]” with Microsofts other plans to shore up its OS-native storage components. Future versions of SiteStor, coming this summer, will support more operating systems and devices, and will add resource-planning policies, he said.
SiteStor licenses cost from $1,295 to $2,995 per server, with extra support options. It competes against Suns Highground technology, and products from lesser-known companies like Astrum Software Corp.