Legato Announces AlphaStor 2.0

Simplify storage management

• By Chris McConnell
• 02/07/2002

While many software products attempt to simplify storage management, few address issues related to physical concerns such as locating tapes and media recycling. A product from Legato Systems, Inc. now better aids administrators with these tasks.

Announced last week, but generally available since December, AlphaStor 2.0 is Legato’s first major update since it acquired its original developer, SCH Technologies, Inc., last year.

AlphaStor 2.0 works with Legato’s backup-and-recovery package Networker to manage tape libraries. It allows servers to share tape libraries and manages backup tasks. In addition, it creates an index of individual tapes to track their use and allows administrators to set policies for the reuse and shipment of tapes.

Administrators who need to open the library and pull and individual tape can easily find the tape they want through AlphaStor’s index. In a library with hundreds of seemingly identical tapes this can be no easy feat without the aid of an index. Enterprises who ship tapes to a remote location for archiving can use the product to track tapes that need to be shipped.

Denise Reier, director of product marketing management solutions group at Legato says the company plans to integrate AlphaStor with other backup-and-recovery products like those from Veritas, in part because it believes the product is unique. “We believe AlphaStor is at least eighteen months ahead of the market,” she says.

AlphaStor consists of two components, a central server and client agents. The central server runs on a standard Windows NT/2000 server and routes backup requests. Backup clients can run on a variety of server platforms including, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and Windows.

Reier says the management server does not need to sit in-band to manage tape-libraries. Instead, it can manage traffic by communicating with the server agents. "Its non-disruptive to the customer environment," she says.