OIL & GAS

Bycast Inc., the leading provider of grid-powered storage management software, today announced that Bycast and IBM have entered into an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) software licensing agreement that will enable IBM to deliver IBM branded products based on Bycast StorageGRID software. Under the OEM agreement, Bycast StorageGRID software will become the basis for IBM System Storage Grid Access Manager Software. In addition, IBM will also utilize Bycast’s File System Gateway technology to provide a standard CIFS/NFS interface for the IBM System Storage DR550. Both IBM Grid Access Manager and IBM DR550 File System Gateway were recently announced as new products in IBM’s System Storage product portfolio. “Our customers worldwide are faced with the growing challenge of efficiently managing and securing retention managed data and other critical information assets with operational efficiency” said Craig Butler, Business Line Executive, Archive, IBM System Storage. “Through our work with Bycast, IBM will continue to deliver innovative archiving solutions that protect data and simplify management of massive archives”. The expanded relationship builds on a proven product with market success and passionate customers. Since June 2005, IBM and Bycast have been jointly delivering the IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution - a reference data archiving solution targeted at the healthcare sector. The OEM agreement will enable the delivery of IBM branded data archiving products for multiple verticals worldwide. “We are enthusiastic that our expanded relationship with IBM now makes StorageGRID technology available to IBM customers worldwide” said Dr. Moe Kermani, President and CEO of Bycast. “We are also pleased that IBM has selected StorageGRID as an integral part of their archiving product strategy.” Retaining massive volumes of business critical fixed-content data for long periods of time is presenting new and tough storage management challenges to IT administrators. StorageGRID delivers a high-performance, high-availability storage platform that protects data and simplifies the management of massive archives by scaling on demand, simplifying data migration and automating recovery from a disaster. StorageGRID delivers a virtualization and data protection layer that creates a unified fixed-content storage system across multiple facilities and heterogeneous storage hardware. StorageGRID enables formation of storage systems that can scale to petabytes of data across hundreds of sites.