HDS Gives IT Managers New Choices for Hardware Agnostic CDP, Replication and Recovery Software

A single software product that can deliver continuous data protection (CDP), replication and automated application recovery for heterogeneous open system environments is still an anomaly in today's world. Most software that does CDP, replication or application recovery may do one of these functions well but rarely can it do all three well or deliver the breadth of functionality that enterprise IT managers desire. However today's announcement that Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) will co-brand and resell InMage System's Scout as part of its worldwide storage solutions offerings is a tip-off that such a solution exists and is ready for prime time in enterprise midrange shops.

IT managers of midrange systems (Linux, Windows and UNIX) in enterprise organizations are well aware that they are facing new requirements to better back up, replicate and recover the data on these systems. However rarely do they have the budgets to deploy separate products to deliver each of these features or the staff to manage them if they do implement them. Then even in circumstances where these individuals are aware of solutions such as InMage Systems Scout, their corporate cultures may dictate that they work directly with enterprise technology providers like HDS.

It is this combination of factors that makes today's announcement between HDS and InMage significant. One of the biggest impacts it has is that it further helps to validate that InMage Systems' Scout is enterprise ready as HDS is both a conservative company and a storage provider that sells primarily into enterprise accounts.
 
HDS's willingness to co-brand and resell InMage sends a clear signal to enterprise IT managers that HDS has internally tested and found InMage worthy of the HDS brand and that Scout is ready for the rigors of enterprise workloads. Further, for those IT managers that may have been interested in InMage's technology but concerned about InMage's worldwide support capability, HDS's co-branding of InMage takes that concern off of the table as HDS clearly provides staying power that InMage by itself did not have.
 
Adding InMage Systems' Scout to HDS's solutions portfolio now opens up a number of new solutions possibilities that IT managers probably have not considered, especially if they are not familiar with Scout. This relationship provides:

• A proven heterogeneous replication option that HDS can use either across their own product lines or to gain access to competitive accounts.  Centralizing the management of CDP, replication and recovery across disparate midrange operating systems continues to be a lingering pain point for enterprise IT organizations. Now that HDS has entered the scene with InMage, this no longer needs to be the case.

InMage Systems' Scout works with an organization's existing network, server and storage infrastructure that requires minimal or no changes to it in order to deliver these benefits. Using this new solution from HDS gives IT Managers new found flexibility to centrally implement and manage recovery solutions across their existing environment whether or not they are current HDS users.

Further, HDS's addition of InMage gives IT managers not accustomed to working with HDS new reasons to evaluate them. Since InMage works in conjunction with any storage system, these IT managers can now add HDS to their list as an enterprise software provider.

• An entrée for HDS into next generation data protection technologies for DR.  Up to this point, IT managers really could not look at HDS from the perspective of providing a comprehensive, common way to protect all of an organization's applications. That changes with the addition of InMage to HDS's solutions portfolio.

Next generation data protection technologies that are new to HDS include CDP, heterogeneous asynchronous replication, application failover/failback, WAN optimization, and recovery automation. Automating recovery is especially critical as more enterprise server infrastructures look for simplified ways to test the failover and failback of virtualized servers and the applications that they host.

IT managers in enterprise organizations know they need to tap next generation data protection technologies to provide rapid, reliable recovery of an increasing number of application environments - not just for mission-critical environments. InMage System's Scout provides HDS customers with exactly that. So with HDS's announcement today that it is adding Scout to its portfolio of storage solutions, enterprise IT managers now have a new option available to them from a storage provider that has a strong history of bringing stable, proven solutions to enterprise customers.