Las Vegas -- December 6, 2011 -- iWave Software, a provider of storage and cloud automation solutions, today introduced iWave Storage Automator 1.5, a storage automation platform for companies to develop and operate cloud-based storage services on demand using their existing storage infrastructures. By automating the tasks associated with provisioning, reclamation and remediation for storage, iWave Software closes the gap between rapidly expanding storage requirements and a lack of available and affordable IT resources.
"While data volumes within corporations continue to grow at a staggering pace, IT budgets are increasingly under close scrutiny for cost containment," said Cameron Haight, Research Vice President, Gartner, Inc. "IT organizations should look for storage solutions that can work to manage this explosive growth through the offloading of much of the supervisory oversight typically performed by overworked administrators."
Prior to iWave Storage Automator, storage automation resided within management consoles and home-grown scripts, each narrowly focused along vendor and product lines. Using iWave Storage Automator, storage administrators can automate storage services in a self-service, private storage cloud environment that is available to storage consumers, leveraging unified workflows across vendor products and within organizationally defined policies for use and regulatory compliance.
iWave Storage Automator:
- Improves storage administrator productivity by automating routine tasks such as provisioning, reclamation and remediation, letting storage administrators focus on higher value activities;
- Lowers storage operating costs by supporting more storage with fewer administrators;
- Reduces storage outages by ensuring best practices are automatically followed for each provisioning request, removing configuration errors during provisioning;
- Reduces unnecessary storage expenditures by identifying and reclaiming unused storage; and
- Improves end-user satisfaction by reducing the time to provision new storage from weeks to hours.
Leveraging iWave Software's powerful cloud orchestration platform and 17 years of field experience working with global 500 firms, iWave Storage Automator works with many third-party adapters such as EMC and NetApp storage arrays, Cisco and Brocade switches, and a variety of host and applications, including Windows, Linux, VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper V, Oracle, SQL Server, and more. Support for additional storage arrays from vendors including Dell, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM and others is expected in 2012.
"Automation is essential if we are to traverse the gap between IT staff and storage capabilities and the demands of data growth. Storage Automator users bridge this storage automation gap and significantly increase productivity," said Brent Rhymes, CEO of iWave Software. "Our solution gives storage administrators the ability to develop a fully automated storage services catalog based on best practices, making storage easy for users to consume and for administrators to manage."
iWave Software will demonstrate its Storage Automator solution at the Gartner Data Center Conference at booth #35 in Las Vegas from December 5 through 8, 2011.