Maimonides Medical Center wants increased efficiency from its servers and storage systems. The IT staff plans to use storage-management software to achieve that goal.

This week, Mark Moroses, senior director of technical services and security officer, will lay out a plan to improve the Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital's systems. His first target is to replace 10 Windows servers with a cluster of six. One department uses only 30% of its capacity, while another is tapped out and unable to work, so Moroses plans to move all file access to the storage area network. Users will get faster access to data and have more server capacity.

The medical center already runs SANsymphony software from DataCore Software Corp. to store, move, and protect electronic records for ambulatory, obstetrical, and gynecological services. The SAN hardware is a mix of IBM SSA drives and Fibre Channel switches from Gadzoox Networks Inc. "Because of SANsymphony, the server configuration doesn't have to do all the work," Moroses says. "I expect to get our return on investment within a year of installation."

SANsymphony 5.0 helps achieve such results with three features. The open-networking platform lets customers combine heterogeneous components on a SAN and retain single-console management. Networked managed volumes also let administrators grab capacity as needed, so reserved unused storage space doesn't go to waste. Plus, storage domains give administrators metrics for chargebacks, security policies, and prioritized queries based on business units.

Competitors FalconStor Software Inc. and Hewlett-Packard pay lip service to such features, but DataCore is alone with open delivery of them, Evaluator Group analyst Randy Kearns says. For example, SANsymphony lets customers offload a software feature, such as remote copying, to an Intel-based server. Customers can have multiple storage nodes and offload the software tools to the Intel-based server.

SANsymphony 5.0 is priced at $160,000 for 2 terabytes of disk space and two Fibre Channel switches.