NetApp to acquire Onaro

For those of you who may not have been reading the newswire today, NetApp announced an agreement to acquire Onaro. For those not familiar with Onaro I'll give a brief overview of who Onaro is, what they do and their value proposition.

Upon hearing about this acquisition today I got very excited since I've been familiar with Onaro for the past 3 years and have been one of the cheerleaders of this company's solutions for some time.

Who's Onaro?

Onaro's a leading provider of Storage Service Management software based in Boston with an R&D facility in Israel. Over the years they've accumulated an impressive list of customers comprised of the "Who's Who" of the Fortune 50. In addition, they have made it onto the Gartner magic quadrant as one of the leading visionaries in 2007 and captured the "Best in show" award at VMWorld 2007 for their VMware capabilities.

What does Onaro do?

Onaro extends Data center automation to storage by providing:

• Real-time heterogeneous reporting without agents from the entire storage infrastrucure
• Application and Service level centric views and service quality reporting
• Support for IT processes such as built, manage, run, optimize, chargebacks
• Support for storage management decisions based on actionable data for:
  • Root Cause analysis - Every change is logged and analyzed
  • Troubleshooting - Track changes quickly to identify and rectify issue
  • Capacity Planning - Continuous reporting with trending and tiering information
  • Performance - Switch & array performance with built-in detection of service quality violations
  • Availability -
  • Server & Storage Utilization  - Identify underutilized resources
  • Server Virtualization  - Strong VMware integration and identification of hosts as server virtualization candidates
  • ITIL - Impact prediction prior to implementation
  • Audit & Compliance - Log all changes to environment with searchable database
  • Consolidation & Migration- Address issues prior to migration and pre-assess impact of change.

  Onaro's key features

• Unobtrusive, agentless discovery and reporting of heterogeneous storage environments
• Scalable architecture with rapid deployment
• Continuous monitoring and logging of all changes made to the environment
• Service path creation from applications to storage and correlation of infrastructure to logical devices
• Correlation and management of storage devices in a server virtualization environment with Cross-Domain visibility
• Continuous monitoring for reporting and management
• Deployment validation based on  Best Practices
• Quick identification of applications that could be migrated to lower storage tiers
• Validation of pre-migration plans based on "What-If" scenarios
• Monitoring and logging of all changes during migration
• Monitoring and reporting of post migration storage service level delivery

Here's an illuminating post from John McArthur (ex-IDC), President and co-founder of Walden Technology Partners on the Onaro acquisition.

I'll be writing more about Onaro in the near future as Onaro's product suite goes way beyond your typical SRM solution and addresses trends that require a different approach and one that does not primarily revolve around file level management.

Comments

[John McArthur]

Nick, I appreciate the post and your view on how this fits with NetApp. I tried to track back to you from my posting on the acquisition, but the trackback didn't work. Here's my post: http://blog.waldentechnologypartners.com/2008/01/04/netapps-blogger-explains-onaro-and-a-customer-comments/#more-54

[Nick Triantos]

Thanks for the heads up. I noticed that none of the trackbacks work not just for my blog but for the rest of the NetApp bloggers.

Looks like typepad needs Onaro for Root cause analysis. :-)