Cloverleaf's Second-Generation Intelligent Storage Networking System Simplifies Complex Storage Environments.

SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass. -- iSN 2.0 is Storage Networking Industry's Only Central Management System to Deliver a Comprehensive Range of Core Data Services That Are Technology and Vendor Agnostic 

Cloverleaf Communications, the first company to deliver Quality of Service (QoS) for heterogeneous storage networks, today announced its second-generation Intelligent Storage Networking(TM) (iSN(TM)) system, providing IT organizations greater data migration and business continuity capabilities that can be implemented non-disruptively for superior network scalability. As part of this approach, the iSN now includes support for Cisco's SANTap service, providing all data migration and replication services also out-of-band. The iSN 2.0 also offers enhanced management functionality, delivering the industry's only single system that can centrally manage, monitor and consolidate capacity, bandwidth and services across both SAN and NAS, regardless of vendors or technology.

Cloverleaf's iSN provides five fabric-based software services at the network level that are technology and vendor agnostic, including:

--Data Migration

--Consolidation and Provisioning

--Business Continuance 

--Simplified Management of Heterogeneous Environments 

--Scaling and Maximizing Assets

"Data centers managers today face a number of serious, costly, management headaches and are desperately in need of tools that can simplify their environment," said Joseph Klein, co-founder and COO of Cloverleaf. "Until now, they've had to contend with utilizing inflexible point solutions, but then management of these individual tools can be cumbersome. The iSN greatly simplifies this management with a single system offering core software services that support business processes and visibility across the entire storage network. No other vendor today delivers such a thorough solution that can allow IT executives to successfully manage their growth and be more responsive to their business by creating QoS offerings that meet critical Service Level Agreements (SLAs)."

QoS in Storage Networking

QoS has been a common practice in the WAN and LAN environments for years. The notion of QoS is that various network characteristics can be measured, improved, and, to some extent, contractually guaranteed in advance. QoS is a necessary natural evolution towards ensuring that data centers can meet the expectations of the end users they're providing services for, delivering the resources they need when they need them through simple, straight-forward policies.

"While QoS is still a relatively new concept in the storage networking market, SLAs are not, particularly to systems integrators who live and breathe by the service agreements they sign with their customers," said Arun Taneja, founder of Taneja Group, a technology analyst firm. "For storage integrators, scaling their customer environments with minimal 'touch' is critical. Adding capacity, ports and new hosts to the storage network can become a time-consuming, disruptive and expensive endeavor, increasing chances of exposure on their SLAs or failing to meet customer performance targets. The Cloverleaf iSN not only provides the kind of visibility that is required to ensure that a company's business policies are being implemented, but also enables the kind of economic and operational efficiencies that is the goal for integrators and end users alike."

Cloverleaf's Five Software Services

At the core of the iSN's offering are five fabric-based software services that can be implemented in modules or integrated all at once.

Data Migration

Cloverleaf's technology and vendor independent system uniquely enables non-disruptive data migration from any-to-any storage, significantly easing deployment into existing environments. The iSN 2.0's Proxy Volumes allow users to start small, migrate gradually and even restore data to the original state if needed.

"With companies constantly making technology, product and vendor changes within their data center infrastructures, data migration is a painful issue that most IT organizations are wrestling with today," said Elic Yavor, co-founder and CTO of Cloverleaf. "Cloverleaf's iSN truly simplifies this process like no other solution, our ability to manage all storage as a single pool, regardless of associated vendors or technology, turns data migration into a seamless and transparent task."

Consolidation and Provisioning

For IT executives who need to align business policies with storage availability and accessibility, the iSN offers many powerful attributes for consolidation and provisioning. With the iSN, users can create pools of storage and even choose those tiers based on the business values of the storage. Additionally with the iSN, capacity can be consolidated across all protocols and be associated with storage tiers. Dynamic volume expansion is supported by thin provisioning, sparse volume and over-subscription features.

"For Cloverleaf, virtualization isn't a product but an enabling technology that allows for the inclusion of virtualization or bandwidth and services in addition to capacity management," said Yavor. "The integration of policy, our three-dimensional consolidation of capacity, bandwidth and services as well as tin provisioning makes the iSN a very effective tool."

Business Continuance

Cloverleaf's iSN provides a complete set of business continuity services incorporating persistence, schedulability, massiveness and manageability. Periodic replication delivers the most effective Asynchronous disaster recovery solution, as only changes in the snapshots are replicated. Overall, Cloverleaf's snapshot mechanism supercedes traditional replication approaches that are done once a day, enabling update intervals as low as every few minutes.

In addition to traditional readable snapshots, the iSN also offers massive Virtual Replicas (writable snapshots). The iSN's snapshots are extremely durable and reliable, able to survive any unplanned failover or planned maintenance without data corruption. Cloverleaf's snapshots are persistent and can replace the need for traditional incremental backups as they are much more efficient in capacity and bandwidth, enabling zero time creation and recovery.

"Cloverleaf uniquely can produce and manage hundreds of thousands of snapshots as the iSN provides the necessary tools to both schedule and group them in a single command," said Yavor. "Customers find this feature significant as the ability to create, manage and also retire snapshots is key. The bottom line is lower downtime because the iSN allows users to make an instant recovery from snapshots and rapid recovery from disk backup."

Simplified Management of Heterogeneous Environments

Cloverleaf's ability to offer QoS comes through its simplified management of heterogeneous environments. The iSN enables data center managers to have visibility into all storage network assets, utilization and processes. Additionally, IT executives can take the information secured by monitoring and control and can make plans to bill back or better assign the costs to the organizations that require the services.

Scaling and Maximizing Assets

With no relief on budget constraints and the need to scale the storage assets in an organization, the iSN supports the graceful incorporation of new products and technologies while fully exploiting the capabilities of the installed base in a scalable and non-disruptive manner. Essentially the iSN enables data center managers to fully maximize all resources including capacity, bandwidth and servers.

About Cloverleaf Communications Inc.

Cloverleaf provides an Intelligent Storage Networking(TM) (iSN(TM)) system, based on proven technology, offering a complete set of fabric-based software services oriented to business processes that can be implemented in modules or all at once. Unlike other industry offerings, the Cloverleaf system is scalable and non-disruptive to deploy and is the only system available that is technology and vendor agnostic across all services. The iSN enables IT organizations to be more responsive to the business through operational flexibility and efficiency, creating Quality of Service (QoS) offerings that can be implemented over time to meet or exceed all SLA's.

Founded in 2001, privately-held Cloverleaf is headquartered in Southborough, Mass. with a technology development office in Israel. The company delivers its product to customers both direct and through an elite channel of system integration partners located in North America and Europe. For more information visit www.cllf.com or call ([phone].