Few customers have just one storage vendor. Most buy storage as needed from a variety of vendors, based on the cost, performance, capacity, and the reliability of the storage system. That keeps storage vendors such as EMC, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems in business, but it makes the job of managing storage resources difficult.

DataCore Software Corp. on Wednesday unveiled an upgrade to its SANsymphony software that may help with some of those management problems. The application's virtualization capabilities, which treat storage systems as a single pool of storage resources, now includes better links to Windows applications.

SANsymphony 5.2 can be used by Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server users to take snapshots of data and mirror them across systems. They also can use Microsoft tools for copying and creating paths within what DataCore calls storage pools. Through the use of hyperthreading, DataCore says it can now push data through at a rate of 2.1 Gbytes per second. Storage administrators will also be able to manage more data because they'll no longer have to load up individual agents for different platforms. SANsymphony 5.2 can glean the information it needs from Windows, Unix, Linux, and NetWare hosts without using any agents to gather that data.

Users of SANsymphony could see hardware savings as well as a reduction in personnel costs, says Bill North, an analyst at IDC. "SANsymphony creates a single pool from disparate storage resources that allows more efficient use of storage and allows customers to consolidate inefficient storage systems."