Lucas Mearian

Taking advantage of its recent acquisition of TrelliSoft Corp., IBM Corp. next week plans to introduce its first storage resource management software to offer advanced features such as 300 preset reports, chargeback and load balancing, all based on open standards.

Taking advantage of its recent acquisition of TrelliSoft Corp., IBM Corp. next week plans to introduce its first storage resource management software to offer advanced features such as 300 preset reports, chargeback and load balancing -- all based on open standards.

Sun Microsystems Inc. last month launched a new version of its storage area network (SAN) management suite that is the first storage software to use standards central to an industry-wide effort to bridge the interoperability gap in multi-vendor SANs. The new management platform also ties together existing management applications under a single view.

Microsoft Corp. last week announced storage management software that will let systems running Windows 2000 Server and Windows .Net Server 2003 communicate with storage arrays across multiple devices supported by more than a dozen leading vendors.

In the midst of continued corporate IT belt-tightening, storage vendors are fighting one another over sales in the burgeoning midrange market as users look for small but powerful disk arrays that can centralize their storage and scale across distributed networks.

Joining the move toward storage virtualization, Unisys Corp. last week announced a hardware appliance that pools data from different disk arrays installed on a storage-area network (SAN) and lets the information be managed as if it were coming from a single source.

3Ware Inc. is planning to announce a new serial ATA RAID controller that uses a combination of cheap disk technology and high-performance redundancy to give it many of the attributes of more expensive SCSI-attached drives.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) on Monday plans to announce that it has agreed to polish a draft version of the proposed Bluefin standard.