Any storage environment has it's own level of complexity. One of the more common ones being that the environment is not made up of a single device type and will be a mix of both physical and virtualized storage devices. A storage management solution needs to be able handle heterogeneous environments. For example, the majority of Network Attached Storage devices run a proprietary operating system; EMC Celerra running DART, NetApp running Data ONTAP. The software solutions that are used to manage the Windows-based infrastructure must be capable of performing the same tasks on all the device types present.

Having a hetrogenous storage environment should not mean creating two separate management systems, separate quota policys, separate reports and separate chargeback jobs. The nature of a device’s operating system should be transparent to your Storage Resource Management strategy.

In a nutshell, a benchmark storage management solution should allow you to:

• View enterprise-wide usage reports; across all Windows, SAN, NAS and virtualized environments
• Manage control policies for all device types from a single interface, a single view
• Include all device types, all stored data, in a single billing policy

Northern Storage Suite is a Windows-based software solution that supports both virtualized and physical environments such as Windows, Windows cluster, HP PolyServe, HP StorageWorks, SAN devices when connected to a Windows host, all CIFS compliant NAS devices and has dedicated support for NetApp NAS and EMC Celerra.