EMC Eases Exchange Storage

EMC Corp. last week launched Storage Administrator for Exchange, software designed to ease storage-administration tasks and provide rapid failover for midsize Microsoft Exchange implementations deployed on EMC Clariion networked-attached storage devices. The product allows E-mail management, data migration, and SAN storage to be performed from within Microsoft Exchange System Manager.

Law firm Perkins Coie LLP uses the software to manage its 2,000 Exchange mailboxes. The mailboxes are gathered into 12 storage groups, each of which is assigned to one of four Exchange servers. Should one of the servers fail, its storage groups would be automatically reassigned to another server.

EMC acquired the technology when it bought software vendor Allocity Inc. last year. "We were skeptical about putting something as important as Exchange atop a startup piece of software," says Jim Ryan, Perkins' systems infrastructure manager. EMC's purchase of Allocity quelled those fears.

Storage Administrator for Exchange starts at $2,000 per Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage array when deployed on a Clariion AX100.