In a series of wide-ranging announcements, Legato Systems Inc yesterday outlined a set of extensions to its Enterprise Storage Management Architecture aimed at providing maximum protection for local and remotely-held corporate data. The announcements include several enhanced back-up/recovery features, remote desktop/laptop integration and a new protocol for future storage management. The California-based enterprise storage management company said it was announcing 20 new products, five of which are available immediately, five more in the fourth quarter with the balance delivered in the first and second half of 1999. Edward Cooper, corporate director, strategic communications for Legato said of the 20 products, three were very significant. In the remote space, the company announced NetWorker Remote; a piece of software designed to provide automatic virtual back ups of files on Windows 95/98 and Windows NT workstations and laptops. Cooper said any changed data is automatically transferred over a standard communication link and backed up to the corporate server thereby eliminating the need for the user or administrator to duplicate files manually, as was the case in the past. In the data accessibility space, Legato got together with EMC Corp to announce a high data accessibility solution for EMC storage environments, something which Legato had not previously been able to offer. EMC specializes in providing data protection solutions in the high-end, business critical applications space but Cooper said its software only addressed the physical layer i.e. what to do if a hardware back-up system went down. Legato NetWorker for EMC Symmetrix adds protection add the logical (software) layer he said, enabling rapid resumption of business operations in the event of application failure, software corruption or data center outage. He said the first release is designed for customers who run Oracle database software on Solaris. The solution will enable those customers to create separately-addressable copies of their database and perform high-speed back up from a second host, while the production database remains on-line and fully available to users. Support for Oracle on HP-UX and SAP R/3 for Oracle on both Solaris and HP-UX are scheduled for the fourth quarter, he added. The third significant announcement is in the Shared Area Networking, or SAN, space. SAN is an emerging new networking topology (in the high-end environment) that enables companies to perform their back-ups on separate, fibre-channel networks as opposed to keeping them on the standard local area network, where the back-up process typically slows down performance. Legato said it has developed a new application, called SmartMedia, that allows companies to view and manage all the removable media management devices (tape libraries, tape autochanges, optical dukeboxes and so on) on the enterprise. In the past, organizations had to have separate storage devices for each server but this new application will enable them to realize huge cost savings by placing the devices on the network. SmartMedia takes advantage of standards developed for the SAN environment but the company said the software would work on normal Lans too. Legato also said a new version of its enterprise source management application, Legato GEMS 1.2, was also immediately available. The software enables companies to manage groups of back-up servers from one central console. It also announced new software to enable companies to perform back ups in clustered environments. He summed up the other 15 products as software for more comprehensive reporting on back-up jobs as well as numerous improvements and enhancements to existing products.
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