Storage networking specialist iWave Software has launched an automation product that empowers line-of-business users to provision, extend and reclaim enterprise storage without having to bother the IT department.
News of this nature is being welcomed more and more as a breath of fresh air in many enterprises, because businesspeople can do more on their own while allowing IT admins to focus more on efficiencies and not have to deal with the more routine aspects of their jobs.
iWave Storage Automator provides users such as VMware administrators, Linux administrators and Windows users with a catalog of fully automated storage services accessible through an intuitive, self-service Web portal.
“This new version allows us to extend the automator over onto the file system,” Ron Smith, vice president of sales and marketing at Frisco, Texas-based iWave, told eWEEK. “It ships as a v-app—so it snaps right into the VMware ESX server. This allows us to get it stood up and running in a matter of hours.”
Once installed in the ESX server, it automatically gathers all the storage assets in the system: arrays, switches, hosts, vCenters, everything—and imports it all into the Introspection engine inside the iWave platform, Smith said.
“Then it will go and figure out all the attributes that are associated with all those assets. Once you do that, it’s a simple matter of defining a policy—if it’s different from what we ship out of the box—and associate that with a service, which associates back to a user, and you’re good to go,” Smith said.
Features in iWave v6.5 include:
- Automated services for block and file storage: Users can provision, remove and extend block storage for Linux, VMware ESX Servers and VMware clusters, as well as CIFS (Windows) and NFS volumes. iWave Storage Automator v6.5 also now supports iSCSI-connected block storage, configures Windows Active Directory permissions on CIFS and enforces quotas on provisioned storage.
- Expanded multi-vendor support: Supports EMC VMAX, VNX and CLARiiON, Dell Compellent and NetApp FAS storage arrays.
- Automated chargeback/showback functionality: Automatically associates charge codes with any storage provisioned or reclaimed by the user with report data easily downloadable into existing chargeback or showback reporting systems.
- A new software development kit.
- Integration with RESTful Web API: Integrates into an organization’s existing portals, IT process orchestration middleware and private cloud architectures.
A free 30-day trial of iWave Storage Automator 6.5 is now available at iWave Software’s Website.