Opalis Was NOT Acquired By Microsoft

The IT management software and operations communities have been buzzing this week about reports that Microsoft acquired IT process automation vendor Opalis Software. We have unequivocally confirmed that this rumor is incorrect. Opalis has NOT been acquired by Microsoft. It remains an independent entity, at least for now.

Opalis, based outside of Toronto, has repeatedly reported impressive revenue growth over its short history. For the past few years, it has been a desirable morsel for larger vendors seeking to add strong process automation to their portfolios. Many have expressed interest, but its success allows Opalis to command a high premium that no suitor has yet been willing to pay.

Some argue that Opalis actually should not be acquired at all. It has built several tight partnerships, including one with Microsoft and this rich ecosystem positions Opalis as a viable standalone vendor. Of course, this requires Opalis to continue innovating aggressively to retain its desirability and prevent commoditization. So far it has been successful at keeping its innovation edge. If it slips, so will its valuation and that will certainly accelerate an acquisition.

Process automation technology is too important for the major IT vendors to ignore and our client inquiries corroborate that the Opalis technology is well regarded in this category. Process automation is a cornerstone of advanced IT automation that conceivably enables cloud computing and automated self-service service request fulfillment. Even at a high valuation, the return on this technology will also be high.

Regardless of its stamina on the innovation treadmill, we do believe someone will eventually consume Opalis. It is premature to say who will prove to be that successful shopper. That includes Microsoft.

By Glenn O'Donnell

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HP Acquires Cluster File Storage Software Vendor IBRIX

Today, HP announced that they will be acquiring the startup cluster file storage software firm IBRIX in a deal with few disclosed details. Congrats to HP for making another interesting acquisition in the clustered storage space, following their Feb. 2007 acquisition of Polyserve and their October 2008 acquisition of Lefthand. IBRIX makes software that allows users to cluster many nodes of storage (either industry standard servers or iSCSI/FC SAN arrays) for use in high performance global namespace file storage.  IBRIX’s customer base includes some 175 firms, generally in the high performance compute (HPC), video rendering/animation, and oil and gas exploration spaces.

This is an interesting move for HP who points to building share in HPC, content depot/cloud storage and archiving as key goals for this acquisition. Clearly those are high growth markets, so it’s no surprise that HP is interested in accelerating their traction there. But, it is surprising to see archiving and content depot listed as top level goals given that IBRIX doesn’t have WORM capability or object orientation. Additionally, you have to wonder what this says about Polyserve given that they were a maker of high scale global namespace file storage, and is now the basis for HP’s current cloud offering, XDS. There seems to be some overlap there, and it will be interesting to see what lines they draw to delineate use cases for customers.

Another area of concern here is the significant partnerships that IBRIX has with HP rivals EMC and Dell.  IBRIX was the original software used for EMC’s HULK scale out hardware offering before they completed the MAUI software that combined with HULK to make Atmos, EMC’s cloud storage offering. There are still a large number of users with highly complex environments that have IBRIX software mated to EMC as well as Dell hardware as back end storage; HP will have to be careful to avoid disrupting those power user customers as they develop their strategy for moving forward with IBRIX.

As with Polyserve and Lefthand, IBRIX is software only, so it makes sense for it to be owned by a major hardware player that can sell it as a comprehensive solution including hardware and services, rather than having customers cobble solutions together themselves. But, it will be tricky for HP to determine how to support existing solutions with gear from competitive vendors, how much to combine it with other software versus leaving it as a standalone product, and how it can fit with HP’s broader vision of storage.

On the positive side, HP has many back ends that could fit different types of IBRIX deployments, from Proliant servers to Lefthand iSCSI storage to EVA mid range SAN arrays, so the likelihood is that they have the right raw materials to make it work. On the negative side though, HP now has a very broad lineup of storage products, some internally developed, some acquired and some delivered through partnerships, and maintaining a consistent vision and value proposition that meet specific customer requirements may be a challenge.

By Andrew Reichman

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Here We Go Again: WLAN Acquisitions Continue

Here we go again, the most recent in a rash of acquisitions, but only the second of an infrastructure vendor this year as HP  today announced its intent to acquire the Colubris Networks.

Why this is good for both sides:

• I've long viewed Colubris a a strong technology play in search of a wider audience. I don't think many would disagree that, of the vendors Forrester has evaluated in the past, Colubris may have been in tight contention for limited reach due to channel and plain, physical size in comparison to some of its rivals.

• Colubris will bring to ProCurve a solid WLAN infrastructure base of IP to HP; one of the earliest vendors to get into 802.11n infrastructure development, and early proponent of a tri-radio access points, the company brings solid technology to HP.

• Perhaps most importantly, the capital to make the Colubris acquisition shows that HP is investing in ProCurve and is committed to the business unit's success competing in a market with formidable competitors such as Cisco in the wired and wireless networking space.

What's missing? A couple elements:

• There is clearly interest from WLAN infrastructure vendors in providing Wireless IDS/IPS capabilities, Aruba's acquisition of Network Chemistry's assets  and Motorola's recent announcement are testament. Bringing on WIPS/WIDS functionality would do well to round out the ProCurve WLAN suite.

• Cross-sells with HP's iPaq team in Cupertino. HP is a massive entity, however, the natural synergy between the Wi-Fi enabled enterprise handsets the company sells and it's voice-ready WLAN infrastructure is a solution sell waiting to happen.

As IT departments seek to build or winnow vendor shortlists of WLAN providers, the list gets shorter and shorter. Among the WLAN pure-play, or overlay vendors, 3Com, Bluesocket, Extricom and Meru remain. Based on Aruba's shares outstanding value on paper - making it multiples above the price paid for Trapeze - the field of "independents" (and, for that matter, acquisition targets) shrinks to three. Nortel, given it's lack of a clear strategy on 802.11n (very reminiscent on ProCurve, pre-announcement) could benefit from the infusion of WLAN IP. I've speculated in the past that a Meru/Nortel combination would be a winning one given a shared affinity for voice. After all, what ever happened to the Unwired Enterprise vision at Nortel, anyway?

Should IT buyers expect more of this same type of activity? Aside from Nortel, it's hard to see any major vendors hurting for a WLAN product line, but it is likely to remain a buyer's market across the remaining independents. Established players, such as Siemens, Aruba Networks and 3Com are likely to remain intact given their valuation, parent company structure and SMB niche, respectively. As for Bluesocket, Extricom and Meru, I hear Toronto is lovely in the summer...

By Chris Silva

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Upping The IPS Ante

Motorola announced this week its intentions to acquires Wireless IDS/IPS vendor AirDefense. The acquisition may provide a bit of deja vu to readers who recall the acquisition of Network Chemistry's wireless IDS/IPS assets by Aruba Networks in 2007.

Meru Networks, eschewing acquisition for product introduction made its own announcement on Monday, announcing the company's RF Barrier, an active RF management solution that aims to solve the problem of what the vendor is calling "leaky RF." The Meru solution actively blocks 802.11 RF from escaping the physical confines of a WLAN deployment to thwart external "parking lot" attacks by closing Wi-Fi based attack avenues.

In fact, 2007 - 2008 has been a time focused on shoring up the security of the WLAN as the networks become more critical to over 50% of enterprises Forrester sees investing in the networks today. As the networks are more pervasive, moving toward covering the entire physical environment, and more employees are relying on Wi-Fi to access corporate data and applications, it's high-time to secure the WLAN.

In the case of Motorola, the Wi-Fi network is especially critical. As the vendor embarks on selling its message of the all-wireless enterprise, where WLANs will interconnect not only users to the network, but networke edge devices -- such as WLAN access points -- to the network along with storage, printers and other peripheral devices, the WLAN is citical and, therefore, a major focus for security.

In markets such as retail, standards like the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard dictate wireless security, but compliance and regulation aside, it is becoming easier to secure the WLAN, regardless of the industry you are in. Vendors are rapily working to close security gaps with product enhancements and new product introductions. Look for a broader suite of solutions to address security coming from your primary network vendor; while this won't negate the need to  integrate these add-on network elements, the single source should ease integration to some degree.

How secure do you feel your organization's WLAN is today? What are your concerns either about securing the network or its current lack of security?

By Chris Silva

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Clockss Ticking On Digital Preservation

Not a moment too soon, libraries, universities, and publishers across the globe have flicked the switch on a collaborative digital archiving project that promises to preserve important scholarly content forever.

Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation, a journal from SAGE Publications, just went out of print and has moved years of its online content to the community managed Controlled LOCKSS archive. The archive uses the Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe open-source technology developed by Stanford University and is geographically dispersed across nodes at universities from Edinburgh to Virginia.

It’s a long-term global archiving project that will serve the joint library and publisher communities in the event of a natural disaster and make orphaned or abandoned works readily available to the general public, for free.

CLOCKSS sheds some light on how businesses might start to think about preserving important intellectual property, maintaining authenticity of records, and managing long-term archives. For IT infrastructure and Ops professionals tasked with building and managing long-term archives and plagued with vendor lock-in, high upfront cost,s and ongoing maintenance fees, this open-architecture offers a glimpse of how to build a massively scalable, online archive, without these headaches.

By Jo Maitland

Deduplication Hits The Mainstream

Bottom line for IT Infrastructure and Operations professionals? Your next purchase of a backup-to-disk appliance or backup software will have integrated deduplication functionality, given the slew of announcements from all the major storage players. It’s no longer just pioneering vendors Data Domain and Diligent beating the deduplication drum — it’s all the major storage vendors.

In addition, based on the direction of NetApp, you need to start thinking about how the rest of your storage environment would benefit from integrated deduplication functionality like your VMware environment (server and desktop) or end-user home directories.

NetApp plans to introduce integrated deduplication technology in its NearStore VTL some time this year. In the meantime, the company is promoting the availability of deduplication on its production FAS storage systems and touting the huge benefits of deduplication in VMware environments.

HP just announced integrated deduplication functionality in its enterprise HP StorageWorks Virtual Library Systems (VTLs based on technology licensed from SEPATON) and in its HP StorageWorks D2D Backup System. Other recent deduplication support announcements include SEPATON’s DeltaStor, Sun StorageTek’s April announcement of its VTL Prime offering (based on FalconStor’s Single Instance Repository technology), EMC’s May announcement of its new Disk Library 3D and 4000 family offerings, and Symantec’s NetBackup PureDisk, which supports deduplication at the source. IBM also recently acquired Diligent — although the company has yet to provide any concrete product plans.

These announcements in conjunction with existing offerings from Hitachi Data Systems (its Diligent ProtecTIER VTL) and NEC (HYRDRAstor) indicate that deduplication has reached the mainstream. The only major storage vendor without a dedupe offering of some kind is Dell. But, hey, they just joined the storage party, so we’ll give them a break, for now . . .

By Stephanie Balaouras

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Trapeze: For Sale After All, And Sold

In October of 2007 I speculated, out loud via this blog, as to whether or not WLAN infrastructure vendor Trapeze was for sale. While I don't claim to be a fortune teller (yes, RSS feeds and briefing sessions have, in large part, replaced my standard-issue analyst crystal ball) and it was no secret that the company was, at least intermittently, being shopped, it was with a bit of surprise that I greeted the news of Belden being the confirmed buyer. At $133 million in cash, there is some debate on whether the value of the transaction is consummate with the value of the goods. Given the delayed IPOs as the relatively steep slide ARUN has taken since its post-IPO high in July 2007, it's likely $133M is a fair valuation — I'll leave that question to the 'Street analysts,' you know, the analysts that still use crystal balls.

While rumored in advance of the acquisition itself, I had truly imagined a more WLAN- or at least mobility-focused vendor being the potential buyer, a late-term dark horse in the race for Trapeze. Nortel, of course, would have been a reasonable contender given their on-again, off-again WLAN gear development partnership and resales agreement with Trapeze.

I'm not as dire as some competitors of Trapeze on the news, however, I am not sure how the Belden organization will continue to foster the development and marketing of some relatively innovative WLAN infrastructure and management products (RingMaster is a product that routinely is singled as a favorite by users I speak to when discussing WLAN management products). I suppose that time will tell, however, treating the products as simply a line extension and not a separate, standalone suite upon which to continue innovating would be a shame to see.

In the short-term, the impact of this acquisition on WLAN current customers of Trapeze is not likely to be very major; products will continue to exist and the RingMaster team is a large and influential group within Trapeze — innovation here will not dry up without some missteps by Belden. Those organizations that may be mulling a move to .11n with Trapeze are likely to revisit their vendor short-lists, given what is likely to be viewed as an uncertain future for less established products, from an innovation standpoint.

By Chris Silva

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VMware Advances DR Preparedness

On May 12^th, 2008 VMware announced that nine storage replication vendors have tested and certified their technology with VMware’s long awaited Site Recovery Manager (SRM) offering. SRM is an important step forward in DR (DR) preparedness because it automates the process of restarting virtual machines (VM) at an alternate data center. Of course, your data and your VM configuration files must be present at the alternate site, hence the necessary integration with replication vendors. SRM not only automates the restart of VMs at an alternate data center, it can automate other aspects of DR. For example, it can shutdown other VMs before it recovers others. You can also integrate scripts for other tasks and insert checkpoints where a manual procedure is required. This is useful if you are using the redundant infrastructure at the alternate data center for other workloads such as application development and testing (a very common scenario). When you recover an application to an alternate site, especially if your redundant infrastructure supports other workloads, you have to think about how you will repurpose between secondary and production workloads.  You also have to think about the entire ecosystem, such as network and storage settings, not just simply recovering a VM.

Essentially, VMware wants you to replace manual DR runbook with the automated recovery plans in SRM. It might not completely replace your DR runbook but it can automate enough of it. So much so that DR service providers such as SunGard are productizing new service offerings based on SRM.

Automating more aspects of the DR process is critical to improving DR preparedness. Companies make enormous investments in technology to facilitate DR but they rarely test their capabilities. According to Forrester survey data, 23% of enterprises never conduct a full DR test and only 40% conduct a full DR test once a year. SRM can help companies conduct more frequent tests because automation can reduce the time to execute a test as well as the risk. Forrester believes that frequent testing is the only way to truly prepare for DR.

SRM isn’t free but it’s not exorbitant. It can be purchased a la carte or bundled with other VMware software. The bottom line is that companies are already using server virtualization to improve DR, they’re just doing it manually. In fact, it’s now the number one motivator for virtualization adoption. To some extent, SRM is almost late to market with the needs of customers. Forrester recommends that companies evaluate SRM as part of future purchases and consider purchasing a la carte licenses for existing environments.

By Stephanie Balaouras

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IBM Buys Diligent As Its Deduplication Anchor

On April 18^th, IBM announced its intent to acquire virtual tape library (VTL) and deduplication vendor Diligent Technologies. For IBM, Diligent is a good fit. The company offers both mainframe and open systems virtual tape libraries and they are a pioneer of deduplication. However, IBM already offers a market leading mainframe VTL based on its own intellectual property and an open systems VTL based on FalconStor technology — although the open systems VTL has very limited adoption — so there is also a lot of overlap. Because Diligent is a software solution, IBM can quickly integrate Diligent with any of its storage systems and bring new VTLs to market relatively quickly. It’s very likely that IBM will in fact pursue this route so it can bring an inline deduplicating VTL to market as quickly as possible.

The result of this acquisition? Good news for customers, who will have a choice between two open system VTLs, the FalconStor-based VTL that has much broader ecosystem interoperability and better integration with physical tape and the Diligent VTL that is focused on tape elimination. In the short-term, this will create some confusion for customers, so it’s important to know which camp you fall into — tape integration or tape elimination. You also have to fully embrace deduplication with Diligent; the technology is inline, you can’t selectively decide which backups to dedupe, and all your backups will be deduplicated. Inline deduplication isn’t right for everyone or for all backups. Also, before investing in a non-Diligent VTL, customers should ask IBM for a roadmap that shows at least one year of planned product updates.

In the long-term, IBM will try to find additional opportunities for taking advantage of Diligent’s deduplication technology, either as embedded technology or as a deduplicating gateway to any of its storage systems. This is ultimately a good thing for customers; storage capacities are growing at 50% per year, sometimes 100% per year, and most of this data is redundant and it doesn’t need to be stored on expensive, high performance storage. It would be nice to store this avalanche of data more cost effectively in the future. Customers can expect about 10-15X reduction in data using deduplication, sometimes more depending on the data set.

By Stephanie Balaouras

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IBM Expands Replication Capabilities With Acquisition Of FilesX

On April 10, 2008, IBM announced its intent to acquire FilesX, a small startup that offers server-based replication and continuous data protection technology. The acquisition will become part of the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) family of products.

This acquisition will help IBM Tivoli fill a gap in their current portfolio of offerings for data protection. The vendor currently offers Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), which is one of the leading enterprise-class backup software applications, and Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files, a product mostly used to protect PCs. In addition to traditional backup to tape or disk, TSM can also manage Microsoft Virtual Snapshots (VSS) and its own IBM storage-based snapshot technology in support of instant restore or snapshot assisted backup. But the company didn’t really have an offering for customers who wanted something that was better than backup but not as expensive as storage-based replication, this is where FilesX comes in. With FilesX, IBM can now address the recovery requirements of small enterprises that can’t afford storage-based replication. They can also meet the recovery requirements of large enterprises that want to protect more servers within their company with a more affordable replication offering as well as servers at the remote office.

To be really successful, IBM will need to integrate the management of FilesX into TSM. Customers are no longer interested in having multiple point products for the continuum of data protection options; they want to manage backups, snapshots, replication, and continuous data protection (CDP) from a single console. If achieved, IBM will compete head-on with offerings from CommVault and may surpass the current capabilities of Symantec NetBackup and EMC NetWorker. It’s unfortunate that IBM’s storage-based replication technologies are managed from within IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center; integrating the management of this functionality would make TSM the one stop for any IBM protection technology.

By Stephanie Balaouras

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