Legato Systems Inc, which has just released the latest versions of its networked storage management products, Networker and GEMS, believes storage management is becoming a major strategic buy for big corporates, and the market seems to agree, valuing the $82m revenue company at a market capitalization of $1bn. Legato talks of the storage management business in three sectors, where sector A is the workgroup server back-up market dominated by Cheyenne Software Inc and Seagate Technology Inc; B is networked backup and storage management, in which Legato claims a 65% market share; and C is the emerging enterprise-wide management of distributed data storage from a centralized point. This is the sector the ten year-old company says it began to move into a couple of years ago, and in which it believes it has already established a strong lead. To move it into this market sector, Legato developed its GEMS Global Enterprise Management of Storage product, a Java-based web front end that enables central management across any number of data ‘zones’ via a web interface. GEMS enables customers to manage storage media, software distribution, and policy-based administration. Legato last month signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal with Unilever Group Plc, in which the global giant will deploy Legato’s systems across its 450 different businesses in 180 countries. Unilever will have ten central management centers, each of which will be able to manage all the distributed data zones across the world, so that they can cater for central management within every time zone. Legato executive Edward Cooper says this C sector of the market has taken a while to take off, but now that big corporates are moving to ‘re-centralize’ their servers and take back management control of the costs involved in managing distributed storage, the market is set to explode. Future development from Legato is moving toward more intelligent, ‘self-healing’ storage management, where the software will automate a great deal of corrective action. Cooper believes storage management will develop into a full blown application in itself, incorporating business rules and logic. For example, where legislation dictates that certain data must be stored online for a period of time and then archived, the storage management software will automate this. He says it will become a strategic buy in the same way that databases are currently. Legato’s architecture is based on an any to any approach, that is any client to any server to any storage medium so that it integrates seamlessly with the maximum number of systems, including most flavors of Unix, Windows NT, and most distributed hardware. Networker 5.1, now available, extends the current Unix functionality into the NT 4.4 version, including remote management of storage devices from anywhere in the network. The new release 1.1 of GEMS supports more browsers and adds Oracle database support.
