Nothern Storage Suite signs their largest deal ever in Europe

NORTHERN, a leading provider of storage resource management software solutions, today announced that, ,in cooperation with IBM, it has signed an agreement with the largest engineering consultancy in the United Kingdom for an enterprise purchase of Northern Storage Suite, a complete storage management solution.

The firm chose Northern Storage Suite to provide greater control over storage resources while reducing the growth of user data, which ultimately improves the efficiencies of their HSM (hierarchical storage management) solution by streamlining the data needed to be categorized and migrated. The suite's combination of flexible disk quotas and file blocking reduces and/or eliminates unwanted data. A key driver in the firm's purchase was the ability to charge depending on storage media and spread the storage costs within the organization in an intelligent and fair way. With chargeback working in tandem with automated disk quotas and file blocking, overall system performance is dramatically improved by reducing the amount of data handled in the HSM process (whereby high-value data is moved to high-speed devices, while other data is migrated to less expensive storage media).

"In this economic environment, solutions need to demonstrate their bottom-line value and answer several core questions: does it improve efficiencies, does it save money, is it low maintenance?" says Thomas Vernersson, Northern's CEO. "Northern Storage Suite integrates comprehensive reporting, disk quotas, automation and internal billing via chargeback, allowing the IT organization to maximize their existing storage infrastructure while requiring minimal day-to-day involvement. Our goal has always been to align storage with a customer's business goals, providing users with unfettered access to the information they need, within an efficient, easy-to-maintain framework. That the he largest multidisciplinary consultancy in Europe and the world's eighth largest design firm would entrust their storage management to Northern Storage Suite further underscores our ability to handle even the most demanding, complex storage environments."

More companies are beginning to realize the bottom-line benefits of chargeback, as it's an efficient, low-maintenance tool for automating the enforcement of storage policies, providing users with every incentive to manage their resources intelligently and economically (while exacting penalties for lax management). In conjunction with chargeback, the engineering consulting firm will also leverage Northern Storage Suite's unique end-user portal to further increase the awareness of storage costs and emphasise the need to flatten growth curves.

Thomas Vernersson, Managing Director Northern
Phone: +46 8 457 50 00
Mobile: +46 70 742 79 39
E-mail: thomas.vernersson@northern.net