By Kevin Komiega
July 14, 2006

Opsware acquires Creekpath for SRM

Another storage resource management (SRM) software vendor is being snapped up in an acquisition, but this time

it's not one of the big storage vendors doing the buying. Opsware, a server and networking automation software maker, announced this week that it has signed a deal to acquire Creekpath Systems and its SRM technology for $10 million. The acquisition is expected to close in early August.
 

The deal signals the end of Creekpath, which began as a storage service provider (SSP) and ultimately morphed into an independent software vendor selling SRM products. Creekpath launched its latest offering in April in the form of a new flagship product called Acuity, which fuses traditional SRM capabilities with business analytics. Acuity uses agent-less technology to perform discovery and topology mapping operations and also analyzes utilization rates and monitors data access patterns.

Opsware plans to close Creekpath's Boulder, CO, facilities and re-locate personnel to Opsware's offices in Redmond, WA. Company officials say that Opsware does not expect to sell the current Acuity product, but will build on Creekpath's technology as the foundation for a new storage automation application that is scheduled to be available in the first half of 2007.

"We are not planning to sell any of the Creekpath Acuity products, but we will use the technology to create a storage automation solution," says Tim Howes, chief technology officer at Opsware. "This will give us the ability to automate management across all three of the fundamental infrastructure components in the data center: servers, the network, and storage."

The Opsware Application Storage Automation System will join the company's Server Automation and Network Automation Systems and will integrate the automation of servers, networks, and storage to provide management from an application perspective instead of just at the infrastructure level.

Opsware will enhance the technology it gains through the acquisition and add new features such as full auditing, compliance, and change impact analysis capabilities. The company's existing products already allow end users to automatically provision, patch, configure, secure, change, scale, audit, recover, consolidate, migrate, and re-allocate servers, network devices, and applications. Adding similar capabilities and support for storage devices and networks is the next logical step, according to Howes.

The upcoming Opsware Application Storage Automation System will map dependencies from applications to servers to storage, manage storage utilization by server and application, and provide the ability to audit application infrastructure from servers to storage.