Sterling launches storage management strategy

Sterling Software has launched its E3 (end-to-end enterprise) initiative which it claims will drastically reduce the cost of running storage systems on multiple platforms.

The company intends to make all its storage management software products including Sams:Alexandria, Sams:Disk: Sams:Lifeguard, Sams:Vantage and Sams:Vtape able to run on any platform and any operating system - mainframe to laptop, Unix or NT.

Sams:Alexandria is yet to have its NT version completed but the company said it will be ready to ship within six weeks. It will also launch SAN management software in mid February.

Chris Gahagan, chief technology officer in Sterling Software's Storage management division said the technology will provide mainframe storage capacity management to the whole enterprise.

"Storage managers are spending around $100,000 to $130,000 to manage 200GB of disk storage at the moment, but on the mainframe for the same cost they can mange 1.2TB. We are bringing the same level of capacity management at the same cost but over distributed systems," he said.

The storage management division of Sterling Software currently totals around $125m in annual revenue but Mike Maunder, director of international marketing for the storage management division, said he expects that to grow by around 50 per cent.

"Storage will become a more significant part of the Sterling Business," he said.