AppIQ, an application storage resource management software developer based in Burlington, Mass., made two promising announcements recently. The first was a storage management suite designed to unify the management of applications, servers, storage network and storage subsystems. The AppIQ Solution Suite -- which includes AppIQ Manager, AppIQ for Oracle and AppIQ for Exchange -- is based on the Common Information Model (CIM), an open industry standard for managing heterogeneous storage networks. The company says it is designed to manage the application infrastructure as a system from initial configuration through eventual migration to new technologies.
"With visibility from the application to the storage device and everything in between, end users gain a distinct advantage that can be extremely effective in eliminating chaos in today's distributed data center," said Raymond Paquet, vice president, research director, Gartner Group. "To truly manage storage in a heterogeneous environment and link that storage to the application, you have to expand the view beyond the array. Additionally, by providing horizontal tools with a vertical objective, business groups are aligned behind a common goal which ultimately leads to a stronger bottom line," he said.
AppIQ also announced CIMIQ, a software development platform and testing toolset intended to accelerate deployment of CIM/WBEM/Bluefin-compliant products. CIMIQ is being marketed through the CIMIQ Partner Program to independent hardware and software vendors looking to shorten development cycles and reduce the costs associated with developing CIM-compliant products. By offering CIMIQ to the marketplace, AppIQ says it is giving other vendors the opportunity to leverage its early development efforts while broadening device support for the AppIQ Solutions Suite.
"Standards will quickly move from lip service to absolute requirements for end users," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, The Enterprise Storage Group. "CIMIQ is a great effort by AppIQ to enable the industry to adopt a vendor-neutral CIM adaptation for storage management. Through efforts such as this, I can actually see a day where all this stuff works together for the good of all."
[AppIQ is] trying to do be the Red Hat of the CIM movement, they know how to code the object models and they have cut through a lot of the red tape that is required to apply the DMTF open source to storage," said John Webster, analyst with Data Mobility Group. "The power is incredible, there are so many things that users have always viewed as point solutions that you can start to integrate right now," he added.
CIMIQ is available now while the AppIQ Solution Suite is available only in a beta version.
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Alan Earls often writes about things NAS and SAN in his weekly "SAN/NAS Update: Trends" column. View the latest
About the author: Alan Earls is a freelance writer in Franklin, MA.
