CA Acquires Netreon

The ISV's SAN setup software, SANexec Designer, will be integrated into CA's BrightStor family of storage management products, said Nigel Turner, senior vice president of storage brand management at CA, based here.

SANexec Designer, which will be renamed BrightStor SAN Designer, detects devices on a SAN, draws an accurate picture of the storage network using Microsoft Visio and validates the plan for device compatibility before installation, Turner said. "It takes a lot of the pain and suffering out of figuring out what the SAN should look like," he said.

Netreon, Mountain View, Calif., has a good product, but its sales strategy has not been successful, said Carl Wolfston, director of Headlands Associates, a storage solution provider in Pleasanton, Calif. Under CA, BrightStor SAN Designer will likely receive the resources needed to continue building the product, he said.

Another Netreon product, SANexec Manager, overlaps with existing CA products. CA plans to incorporate any new capabilities SANexec Manager's offers into its BrightStor SAN Manager.

The Netreon acquisition puts CA a step closer to providing dynamic provisioning,the ability for management software to automatically allocate and remove storage capacity to users or applications as needed, Turner said.

The integration of BrightStor SAN Designer with BrightStor SAN Manager product will enable solution providers and customers to design a SAN and then have the resources automatically provisioned, Turner said. CA expects to complete the integration within three months, he said.

"[Dynamic provisioning] is certainly one of the holy grails because, from the administrative standpoint, it greatly reduces your need to constantly monitor reports and then go out and manually do something about it," said Eric Steinberg, vice president of educational services at Boulder Corp., a solution provider in Boulder, Colo.

While BrightStor SAN Designer will be sold via CA's Enterprise Solutions Partners and its direct-sales force, the vendor has not yet determined whether the product will be available through two-tier partners, Turner said. CA will price BrightStor SAN Designer at $10,000 per license.

The vendor did not disclose the purchase price of the all-cash transaction but said it will not affect its fourth-quarter numbers.

JOSEPH F. KOVAR contributed to this story.