StorageTek Unveils New Appraisal Services

Key storage vendors are ramping up services aimed at helping overwhelmed administrators deal with archiving, data protection and storage management.

This week, Storage Technology Corp. unveils its Storage Appraisal Services, which can analyze capacity requirements in often-inefficient heterogeneous storage systems.

StorageTeks Storage Appraisal Services will provide recommendations about backup and recovery operations, file-level and file-system storage resource management, switch port utilization, database resource management, and data duplication and throughput.

Other storage applications to be addressed by StorageTeks professional services cache include virtual tape, continuous data protection, object-level archives for content management, and network virtualization, said Todd Rief, senior director of Global Professional and Remote Services for StorageTek, in Louisville, Colo.

Rief said future professional services from StorageTek will include security, indexing and search, and data valuation. Technology pulled from StorageTeks acquisition of consultancy NetIX System Consulting GmbH is at the heart of the new professional services initiative.

To cement its services commitment to an ILM (information lifecycle management) paradigm, StorageTek has realigned its global services organization around five professional service and remote service areas: implementation and education, data center, storage assessment, disaster recovery and remote managed services, and business continuity.

/zimages/3/28571.gifTo read more about StorageTeks ILM-related deal with Cisco,click here.

The service offerings complement StorageTeks existing TekCare Support Services and Enterprise Support Services, which are largely devoted to maintenance and integration.

In just five years, StorageTek rival EMC Corp. has seen its services business revenues balloon from 6 percent in 1999 to 26 percent last year, according to David Goulden, executive vice president of customer operations for EMC, in Hopkinton, Mass.

Goulden said EMC is building out its services portfolio this year to focus on deeper storage management capabilities and ILM-centric consulting.

/zimages/3/28571.gifClick hereto read more about EMCs recent Internet SCSI support offerings for smaller businesses.

“The role of services is to help our customers deploy our technology,” said Goulden.

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