Fujitsu Siemens Computers takes a new leap forward in Information Lifecycle Management with CentricStor

CentricStor addresses comprehensive capabilities towards Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) which deals with the integration of a variety of activities designed to manage information and information resources throughout their life cycle.

With the introduction of CentricStor Version 3.0, the industry's most-powerful Virtual Tape Appliance offers improved levels of scalability in both performance and capacity as well as in price. Increased performance frees from the burden of critical backup windows and reduces recovery times. Additional automatic failover increases high availability and fast disaster recovery from the entry level up to high-end configurations.

"CentricStor is perfect for use as a central automation component for data protection in heterogeneous environments. Customers worldwide are discovering that CentricStor can be leveraged as the central platform to consolidate their entire business-critical data backup," said Ashraf El-Arabaty, Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise Products, Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "Achieving total Information Lifecycle Management has never been so easy because CentricStor has introduced significant refinement in Policy-based automation."

As a highly scalable data protection solution, CentricStor allows enterprises to consolidate their entire range of magnetic tape systems across Storage Area Networks, in both - mainframe and open system environments. Already offering the broadest platform support, the array of connectivity and supported platforms is further widened.

With a wide range of IBM systems and other predominant mainframes as well as widespread Open Systems plus Network Attached Storage environments, CentricStor supports all major tape automation systems. CentricStor now embraces commonly-used entry level backup and recovery solutions by behaving vis-à-vis the servers like a large number of autoloaders. In addition, the newly introduced FICON interface offers more choice of connectivity for IBM systems.

With Version 3.0, CentricStor introduces support for SLA at the disk cache level, allowing different priorities to be allocated to strictly differentiated customer data or various types of departmental specific requirements. Fast recovery can be guaranteed through the new disk cache residency, by permanently storing selected information in the cache. Another service level is offered with the import and export of individual tape cartridges, which can be transferred to a vault location.