Moonwalk announced its latest Moonwalk software suite, with support for Novell’s Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES2.

Novell’s Open Enterprise Server 2 combines workgroup services from Novell with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, completing the Open Enterprise Server shift to providing workgroup services entirely on Linux. It includes dynamic storage technology for user-defined policies, storage management enhancements and Netware virtualization.

With the announced support for Novell’s OES2 enterprise operating environment, Moonwalk continues to expand its enterprise capabilities. Novell-Moonwalk users can run any mix of Netware 6.0, Netware 6.5 and OES2 under one data management umbrella – a single data management system. They can also take full advantage of data migration, move and copy capabilities delivered by Moonwalk. Moonwalk’s data management and migration engine helps OES2 customers reduce capital expenditures on their storage infrastructure by automatically migrating data from expensive platform-captive primary storage volumes to cheaper secondary tiers and to also leverage the huge cost efficiencies that Internet storage, such as S3, affords via file system interconnectivity, recovering expensive primary storage capacity.

Moonwalk will demonstrate the advanced data migration functionality that its enterprise software suite delivers for Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 users, including the industry’s first solution for simple and transparent data migration and backup of OES2 data to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) for “cloud storage.”

Moonwalk is an enterprise data management system that allows companies to minimize storage expenditure while maximizing existing storage infrastructures. Extending the capability of traditional HSM technology, Moonwalk places unstructured data into perspective by intelligently relocating files to and from various storage locations, depending on the value of that data. This in turn, gives companies greater control of their datasets and optimum use of their storage infrastructure. Common practice has seen companies simply buying more storage to accommodate data growth, creating even bigger headaches further down the track. With Moonwalk, companies can resolve many of these storage issues today, and maintain effective management of disk space on an ongoing basis.

“The OES2 announcement is significant for the Novell user base. Throughout the world tens of millions of users are working within the Novell Netware operating environment, representing a considerable investment across many enterprises. As these organizations consider the decision to migrate from their tried and true Netware environment to OES2, Moonwalk provides a data management platform under which they can seamlessly make that move without any disruption to their current operations,” said Peter Harvey, CEO of Moonwalk.

Moonwalk software delivers data management with metadata-level precision for all information on network storage, servers and clients. It proactively migrates, copies and moves data according to user-defined rules and policies based on criteria such as age, size, file type, file name, file creator and many more granular classification rules.

Moonwalk operates across and between all major file systems, including Windows, UNIX, Linux and Netware environments, and all primary and secondary storage environments. Its stateless architecture requires no additional overhead and is completely transparent to users and applications, with no introduced points of potential failure, ensuring maximum performance and availability. With Moonwalk, applying even one simple rule of moving all files one year or older onto secondary storage can result in an immediate halving in primary storage; applying additional rules typically results in significantly higher capacity savings in some cases in the order of 90 percent.

This announcement follows the Moonwalk-Syncsort announcement where both companies committed to supporting the Novell platforms, ensuring that Novell customers will continue to have access to a ‘best of breed’ end-to-end data management solution.