New York -- Sandial Systems, Inc., today unveiled a new management platform that harnesses Sandial's ConnectIQ network intelligence to usher in a new era of Intelligent Network Services (INS). The new ShadowWorks Backbone Management Platform (BMP) hosts a variety of software modules that provide network services such as network performance profiling, time-of-day network policy configuration, service level agreement (SLA) administration and network policy emulation, among others.

As part of today's announcement, Sandial unveiled the first in a suite of software modules developed for the ShadowWorks BMP, the ShadowWorks Network Performance Profiler (NPP). The ShadowWorks NPP is a profiling tool that helps IT professionals analyze network traffic trends over time to proactively architect strategic SANs and discover new opportunities to improve application performance through network policies.

In the coming months, Sandial plans to announce additional BMP modules that deliver a range of Intelligent Network Services, including: advanced policy configuration, SLA administration, network accounting and billing, network policy emulation and staging and network protocol and traffic analysis.

"The better correlation we can draw between network behavior and application performance, the more effective we can be in supporting business-level requirements," said a company spokesperson.

"As the market for network-based intelligence continues to take shape, two distinct types of intelligence are emerging," said Nancy Marrone-Hurley, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Storage Group. "While some vendors are focused on bringing storage services like replication and virtualization into the switch, Sandial has developed a system that delivers true network intelligence, which has a direct impact on application performance. The ShadowWorks BMP provides a comprehensive perspective of network and application performance issues and enables users to dynamically allocate network resources to address issues.

The ShadowWorks Backbone Management Platform and ShadowWorks Network Performance Profiler are available immediately through Sandial's direct sales force and through select systems integrators and storage OEMs. List pricing for the ShadowWorks BMP with the NPP module starts at $14,950.