LITTLETON, MA, Oct. 20, 2009 (Marketwire) --

LITTLETON, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 10/20/09 -- Akorri, Inc., the leader in virtual infrastructure performance and capacity management for the dynamic data center, today announced that its customer Service Corporation International (SCI) (NYSE: SCI) has been selected by SNW (Storage Networking World) as a Finalist for its Fall 2009 "Best Practices in Storage" Awards Program.

SNW's "Best Practices in Storage" Awards Program identifies and acknowledges excellence among users of storage technology in the following categories:

--  Storage Resiliency, Data Protection and Recovery
--  Storage Virtualization and Cloud Computing
--  Planning, Designing and Building a Strategic Storage Infrastructure
--  Green Computing, Energy Efficiency and the Data Center
--  Technology Innovation and Promise
    

"Data and storage networking initiatives are more challenging and crucial then ever before and is still one of the most important pillars of the IT infrastructure," said Ellen Daly, senior vice president, events, IDG Enterprise. "The organizations and professionals judged to be finalists in SNW's Fall 2009 'Best Practices in Storage' Awards Program have not only met these challenges but are the best of the best when it comes to deploying the most strategic applications and using it to their advantage."

SCI uses Akorri's BalancePoint virtual infrastructure management software to maximize the performance and value of its growing, dynamic virtualized infrastructure. Since leveraging BalancePoint within its environment, SCI has reaped significant benefits including faster troubleshooting/problem resolution, reduction in data center administration needs and costs, and improved justification of new technology equipment requirements and purchases.

"We are pleased that SNW acknowledged SCI's accomplishments in optimizing the performance of their virtualized environment. SCI used Akorri's BalancePoint software to help prove and justify the cost savings and technology needs along the road to virtualization," said John Gavin, CEO and COO of Akorri. "BalancePoint proved valuable for SCI in providing visibility into the back end of VMware and its impact on storage performance, helping to determine how to allocate drive usage to avoid overload. In fact, as a result of using BalancePoint, SCI was able to reduce administration costs by $400 thousand, and cut resources in half by moving from a 50-to-1 to a 300-to-1 servers-to-administrators ratio.