Precise Launches Heterogeneous SRM Tool

offers charge-back feature

• By Scott Bekker
• 03/21/2002

Precise Software Solutions is using its prominent position in Windows server storage to attempt a step up into the software sector that provides higher level views of a company's storage capacity.

Precise launched SiteStore SRM this week, a multi-platform storage performance management product focused on capacity planning, reporting and discovery across the enterprise.

Precise acquired a position in the Windows storage market last year when it bought W. Quinn Inc. The W. Quinn's StorageCentral product for real-time storage resource management, currently in version 5.0, is already widely deployed on enterprise Windows servers.

The two products have different focuses, explains Najaf Husain, president of the W. Quinn group of Precise Software.

"The idea of SiteStore is to give you an enterprise view of your total network storage. Where's my capacity, who's using network space?" Husain says. StorageCentral, on the other hand, sits on a server and blocks storage that would exceed a user's allowance or restricted file types like MP3s and extensions commonly used by viruses.

In this quarter, SiteStore will support Windows NT, Windows 2000, Solaris 8, Red Hat Linux 6.2 and Network Appliance filers. "In Q2, we'll extend to EMC NAS devices and other Unix platforms," Husain says.

One of the key features of SiteStore is a chargeback feature, allowing central IT to charge divisions, departments and branches for their precise storage consumption.

"We provide intelligent reports that give you the means to get to that information if you can put a dollar amount with each class or type of storage," says Steven Toole, vice president for marketing in Precise's W. Quinn group. Using the tool, an administrator can determine "the marketing department is using $50,000 a month in storage, or our Oracle database costs us $75,000 a month in storage," Toole says.