Xiotech Supports Linux and Microsoft Windows

Xiotech Corporation will be supporting Linux and Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments within its ICON Manager user interface in the future. This will help to expand the integrated and automated storage provisioning and management already provided. An announcement to this effect was made at the Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2008.  

 

According to Eric Lomascolo, director of product management at Xiotech, “Our customers have saved significant money, time and stress by simplifying how they monitor, provision and manage their storage through ICON Manager. Storage management is more application-driven than storage-driven, and the human error found in complex management procedures is essentially eliminated, because of the automation and control ICON Manager delivers. With support for additional operating systems, our users will now be able to realize even more functionality and savings across their entire IT ecosystems.”

 

Headquartered in Eden Prairie, Xiotech Corporation provides data storage and protection solutions. The Emprise storage family is built on patented Intelligent Storage Element technology. This helps to eliminate drive-related service events and also to provide high performance.

 

At present, storage provisioning and management are "siloed." This means that IT managers must use multiple management consoles to configure storage; first on the storage array, and then on the physical and virtual servers. The integrated and automated storage management of ICON Manager allows users to provision and manage storage from a single console.  

 

ICON Manager will add support for Linux in the fourth quarter of 2008 and will support Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V by early 2009. It also supports simplified storage provisioning and management for other operating systems, including UNIX, Mac OS and Novell (News - Alert) NetWare.

 

ICON Manager is designed for users of Emprise 7000 and Magnitude 3D 4000 and Magnitude 3D 3000 storage systems. It provides a high level of integration and automates storage management processes across the array and server environments by utilizing Microsoft Management Console plug-ins.

 

Users are guided through common tasks by wizards which speeds up administration. This helps to reduce the possibility for errors and empowers users to realize the full value of their investment. ICON Manager also provides a global view of storage across the array, physical server and virtual machine layers. This helps to avoid the inefficiencies of dark storage, where allocated but unused storage is difficult to locate and identify.