Q&A with Brent Rhymes of iWave Software

VSM: iWave Software just released version 1.5 of its product, iWave Storage Automator. Can you tell us more about your company and this release?

BR: iWave Software is based in Texas with offices in Canada and the United Kingdom. We are a provider of storage and cloud automation solutions. Our products are used by Fortune 500 and 1000 organizations and IT solution providers to reduce costs, improve service and eliminate manual tasks by automating the processes used to manage enterprise data centers.

iWave Storage Automator 1.5 is a storage automation platform that lets companies develop and operate cloud-based, automated storage services using their existing storage infrastructures. By automating the tasks associated with storage provisioning, reclamation and remediation, iWave Software closes the gap between rapidly expanding storage requirements and a lack of available and affordable IT resources. 

VSM: What is the reason you saw for developing this product?

BR: We see a couple of emerging trends that are driving the need for private storage clouds. The first is storage growth. IDC estimates storage will grow by 20 times between now and 2020. Most organizations are starting to realize that their storage administrators will need more than just their old scripts to scale to meet this growth. The old way of storage management just isn’t good enough.

Another trend is the rise of public storage clouds. Users frustrated with their own internal IT storage services now have the option to procure storage from public storage clouds (and often do, even if it is against company policy). In order to stay relevant, internal IT storage organizations need to provide services that are competitive with the public storage cloud vendors, including giving their users the ability to order fully automated storage services via a self-service portal. Our ultimate goal is to help storage administrators manage more storage by letting them fully automate their routine tasks, enabling them to focus on higher value (and more interesting) activities.

VSM: What are some of the features of iWave Storage Automator that our readers should be aware of?

BR: We enable enterprises to deliver enterprise storage as a policy-driven, fully automated cloud service. These are some of the features and functionality we offer in iWave Storage:

• Self-service storage portals provide storage consumers such as DBAs, application developers, and server support staff with the ability to submit and track requests for automated storage services, as well as advanced services such as replication, migrations, etc.
• Storage Service Catalogs provide storage consumers with a catalog of fully automated storage services. Storage consumers are restricted to accessing the storage services that are defined for their particular role(s).
• Fully automated storage services, which end-users can request via the self-service portal and storage service catalog, don’t require manual effort by a storage administrator. Fully automated services can include storage provisioning, reclamation and remediation from storage arrays, through storage networks and all the way to the target devices.
• Storage service templates enable storage administrators to enforce best practices for storage provisioning, reclamation and remediation.
• Pre-built, third-party adapters are included for EMC and NetApp storage arrays, Cisco and Brocade switches, and a variety of hosts and applications, including Windows, Linux, VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper V, Oracle, SQL Server, and more.  Support for additional storage arrays from vendors including Dell, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM and others is expected later in 2012.
• Policy-driven functions are defined by storage administrators so they can specify that certain services require approval before they are delivered.
• Fully audited services ensure that each action is performed by an automated storage service and then recorded in a secure audit log.