SYSTEMS

SUNNYVALE, CA -- Fujitsu Softek, a leading provider of storage management software, today announced the industry's first standalone enterprise storage resource management solution that centralizes and automates storage management in a multi-vendor environment from a single point of control. Built entirely by Fujitsu Softek, Softek Storage Manager™ software allows companies to pool management of disparate data and storage hardware types, including both open and mainframe systems, ensuring that both technology and IT staff resources are utilized efficiently for maximum return on investment. "Now CIOs can predict, provision and proactively manage their entire storage infrastructure, which, in turn, will enable them to save significant costs on operational and capital expenditures while freeing their IT staffs to focus on more strategic pursuits," said Fujitsu Softek President and Chief Executive Officer Steven F.X. Murphy. "By using our end-to-end storage management software solutions - which include SRM, visualization, virtualization, replication and migration technologies - CIOs can realize, at last, the full potential of their storage-area network investments." "Softek Storage Manager software offers a better way to manage data storage - through a centralized and automated business process view and action enabled SRM solution. This enables IT staffs to better utilize and proactively manage, as well as back up and recover more data storage, regardless of their hardware platform or operating system and without interruption to their business critical applications. Now storage device and data storage management decisions can be made based on business requirements and processes versus operational compromises inherited from proprietary hardware requirements," said Murphy. Addressing Market Needs In order to ensure that it delivered a solution that addressed enterprise needs, Fujitsu Softek conducted focus groups with 150 CIOs, IT managers and storage administrators from companies with at least 5 terabytes (TB) of storage and revenues of $100 million or more. The survey results indicated that these IT experts needed: One central console to view storage anywhere in the enterprise on any platform and report on that information; To automate manual, repetitive tasks to eliminate user errors and allow deployment of staff resources on more mission critical tasks; Complete platform and vendor interoperability and flexibility to deal with various media and storage types; The ability to allocate storage resources more efficiently; Capacity to move data within and among sites; To easily view storage resources in multiple ways; Improved reporting and the ability to forecast storage growth for capacity planning; and, Better overall system performance and faster data retrieval times. Centralize To Simplify Centralized storage management, which can be easily integrated regardless of platform or vendor, is a key strategy for meeting these needs of IT managers and storage administrators. Softek's industry-leading visualization technology, included in Softek Storage Manager software, allows single-point viewing of storage resources, capacities and problems. Moreover, it allows users to see and proactively manage their storage investments including storage-attached networks (SAN), network-attached storage (NAS), direct attached storage (DAS) as well as open systems and mainframe storage infrastructures. Automate and Act While some companies offer only monitoring and reporting, Softek Storage Manager software also enables the management of geographically distributed platforms from a single console, allowing storage administrators to "manage by exception" to simplify IT workload; take action when needed; and, eliminate human error while ensuring maximum data availability. In addition, Softek Storage Manager software provides users with the ability to act based on policy. Softek Storage Manager software requires less hands-on time, significantly increasing productivity for storage administrators. Industry watchers see this market opportunity growing rapidly, with Enterprise Storage Group estimating that the storage resource management market will reach $3.8 billion by 2005. Senior Analyst Nancy Marrone of Enterprise Storage Group states, "Softek Storage Manager software is the first enterprise storage management product that does this level of integration. Fujitsu Softek is truly integrating storage resource management, virtualization and data management with storage network management tools." Simplifying and Optimizing Existing Assets The ability to automate some storage management tasks is critical for CIOs looking to manage more storage while reallocating IT staff resources to other areas. Through a detailed one-screen view of a company's storage resources, Softek Storage Manager software illustrates which storage servers are at, near or above capacity, and shows the disks attached to each server and their loads. An action sets screen allows the storage administrator to set policies across servers or groups of servers, building thresholds, and generating reports. Softek Storage Manager software then allows users to run a report, delete files and ultimately automatically provision storage in the virtualized SAN environment. And, Softek Storage Manager software's alert feature enables the administrator to arrange for email notifications, for example, when a mission-critical storage volume is reaching capacity and Softek software can automatically allocate additional storage space to that application. Further, if a lesser-used set of data isn't accessed in two years, the storage administrator can direct the system to automatically archive the data to a tape drive and delete it from the server. Improved Automated Reporting "Here's the problem: many customers have large amounts of storage terabytes that they can't even see yet alone properly manage," said Murphy. "With Softek Storage Manager software, users can see all of their DAS, NAS and SAN investments as well as receive automated reports on utilization of storage across the enterprise." Where previously storage administrators often had to go from server to server and manually record usage levels, Softek Storage Manager software's reporting capabilities generate customizable reports that can be delivered live or via the Web in graphical or tabular format. This allows storage administrators to get information and act on it quickly, before problems occur. Additionally, trend reporting allows CIOs to reduce operating costs by intelligently planning future spending-whether for hardware or IT staff. Softek Storage Manager software, which will ship in Q2, is available for Windows NT and Windows 2000, Sun Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and mainframe platforms OS/390 and Z/OS. The worldwide unveiling of Softek software will take place at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany March 13-20, 2002 in Booth A29 in the Hall 3. For more information visit www.softek.fujitsu.com