MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and BURLINGTON, Mass. -- SGI (NYSE:SGI) and AppIQ(TM) today announced a strategic alliance whereby the companies will provide storage utility management software to maximize the performance, availability and utilization of high-performance, technical and creative applications hosted on heterogeneous storage area network (SAN) environments. The alliance includes an OEM distribution agreement of AppIQ technology and a co-development agreement that brings open, standards-based SAN management and storage resource management to the high-performance computing (HPC) market. "HPC applications have enormous, fast-growing storage requirements, causing HPC application managers to look to the performance, scalability and availability characteristics of SAN technology," said John McArthur, group vice president, Storage Research at IDC. "Managing increasingly complex SAN environments, however, continues to be a challenge. The alliance between SGI and AppIQ promises more effective and efficient SAN management by leveraging AppIQ's standards-based, application-oriented approach." SGI will also market and resell AppIQ's enterprise SAN and storage resource management solutions to customers who need to manage heterogeneous storage environments and the complex interdependencies between storage resources and business-critical applications such as Oracle(R) and Microsoft(R) Exchange. "An open, standards-based software solution that manages both the compute-intensive SGI installed base as well as heterogeneous environments is very attractive to us and our customers," said Andy Pratt, president, Unique Digital, Inc., a value-added reseller and integrator of both SGI and AppIQ solutions. "We see a lot of demand for SGI storage solutions in the oil and gas exploration markets. AppIQ's technology will ease the management of these customers' complex, growing Storage Area Networks." SGI provides end-to-end data management solutions within its InfiniteStorage offering that enable customers to optimize their workflow and manage the most complex data. Products in the InfiniteStorage family include the SGI SAN Server(TM), a turnkey SAN environment for sharing files across heterogeneous platforms and CXFS(TM), a breakthrough, high-performance shared file system. AppIQ provides standards-based SAN and storage resource management solutions that enable customers to manage both SGI and storage resources not based on SGI(R) solutions as a utility to improve the performance, availability and utilization of their SAN-hosted applications. Components of AppIQ's SAN management technology will be incorporated into the SGI SAN Server offering. Product availability is expected later this year. SGI will also market and resell AppIQ's complete enterprise solution suite to provide advanced features such as provisioning, policy-based automation, chargeback, application integration, and support for heterogeneous operating systems and storage environments. SGI will leverage AppIQ's engineering expertise in the storage industry's SMI-S standard to ensure that all SGI InfiniteStorage solutions are standards-compliant. As a result of this co-development effort, all SGI(R) system and storage products, including the IRIX operating system, the CXFS high performance filesystem, the SGI SAN Server product family, the Linux OS-based Altix(TM) 3000 systems, and the SGI(R) Total Performance storage systems, will be supported by AppIQ's software solutions. Customers will be able to use the tightly integrated solutions to reduce storage costs, improve administrative efficiency and increase business and application availability. AppIQ's SAN and Storage Resource Management Technology AppIQ's solutions manage the entire application storage "stack," from the application object layer (databases, tablespaces, mailboxes), to the host, HBA and SAN switch layers, and finally to the subsystem spindle and logical unit numbers (LUNs). By automating the discovery of these storage resources and by modeling this information in an industry-standard knowledgebase, AppIQ's solutions offer a foundation that includes application-to-storage capacity and performance analysis; dependency and path management; event correlation; and reporting. AppIQ's solutions then build upon this foundation by offering an integrated set of powerful business tools, including policy-based automation, risk analysis advisors, automated provisioning, asset management and chargeback. "AppIQ's standards-based, application-focused solutions address our customers' common issues of complexity, scalability, performance and rapid storage consumption," said Gabriel Broner, senior vice president and general manager, Storage and Software, SGI. "As we expand our storage offerings, our alliance with AppIQ will enable us to satisfy the demand from our user base for a single solution that manages the entire SGI storage line, as well as the variety of operating systems and storage resources we support." Common Alliances AppIQ, through its CIMIQ program, delivers enabling technology to a number of storage industry leaders, including Brocade, CommVault, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett Packard, LSI Logic Storage Systems, McDATA, Network Appliance and Sun Microsystems, Inc. SGI has alliances with many of these same companies, making the agreement with AppIQ a natural fit. "This strategic alliance is a big win for AppIQ, given SGI's leadership in high-performance computing and the growth rate in this key vertical market," said Doug Cahill, vice president of business development at AppIQ. "As customers use SANs to consolidate their distributed storage, centralize storage management and improve backup performance, storage complexity will continue to increase. Bundling our technology with SGI's SAN products and offering our solutions through SGI's sales channels will provide customers with one-stop shopping for comprehensive storage hardware and software solutions."