CrosStor Inc, until earlier this year known as Programmed Logic Corp, plans to open up its network attached storage operating system to third party application providers, through a new ISV program it’s calling Omni-ISV. CommVault Systems Inc is the first to join. At the Network Storage 99 event in Monterey, California yesterday, CrosStor also revealed another OEM, UniTree Software Inc, and said that it was developing a new version of its storage operating system to support storage area networks, scheduled for release later this year.
CrosStor claims its new set of APIs, developed for external software integration, will open up market opportunities for application developers to penetrate the network attached storage and storage area network markets. ISV’s can write management applications for the operating system through the APIs. CrosStor claims a number of leading OEMs will be introducing network attached storage devices using its technology over the next 18 months, although it won’t currently reveal who they are. Auspex Systems Inc is one of its existing OEMs.
CommVault produces data and storage management software, and says it plans to create agents that will bring high availability recovery, backup, archiving and hierarchical storage management functionality to NAS appliances running CrosStor NAS. The new OEM customer, UniTree, plans to incorporate CrosStor’s DMAPI Module, which supports the XDSM data management standard, to deliver a high-performance hierarchical storage management product across multiple platforms. The module runs within CrosStor’s StakFS framework, a file system interposer that currently supports most Unix platforms, Microsoft Windows NT and CrosStor’s storage operating systems.
In addition to the APIs, CrosStor plans to deliver an ISV software development kit later this year, and is creating an ISV customer support organization. The company was founded in 1990 by Unix system software engineers from AT&T Co’s Bell Labs. It is based in South Plainfield, New Jersey.
