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BMC Software Inc. and Computer Associates International Inc. are planning enhancements to their respective storage software management suites that automate many traditionally manual functions.
Houston-based BMC this fall will unveil Version 2.1 of its Patrol Storage Manager, which includes such new features as chargeback, which enables companies to track and budget departmental storage use.
The company will follow that release by years end with the rollout of Version 2.2, which supports IBMs nonmainframe DB2 databases. The update will also include options for so-called dashboard views of mirroring, clustering and other functions, enabling users to customize the GUI, said Dan Hoffmann, director of enterprise storage management for BMC.
Beyond that, BMC will add quality-of-service monitoring for storage provisioning in the first half of next year, which will ensure that what is requested of the storage system is done. In addition, it will add storage management with workload modeling—which adjusts the storage depending on usage—in the second half of next year. Advanced age-based management, with old data being automatically moved to cheaper media, is also being considered, Hoffmann said.
For CAs part, over the next 12 months, the Islandia, N.Y., company will convert the program modules in its BrightStor suite from an agent approach, where data is monitored with algorithmic guesswork, to an instrumentation approach, with the modules trusting applications own telemetry, said Marco Coulter, vice president of BrightStor strategy.
The initial batch of modules for BrightStor, called iSponsors, will launch at the SAN East event in Washington next week. It will support hardware from EMC Corp. and Brocade Communications Systems Inc., backup software from Legato Systems Inc. and Veritas Software Corp., and CAs own BrightStor portal.
Future batches will debut every few weeks throughout the next year, Coulter said. The iSponsors and a development kit for third parties are free, he said.
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