EMC Stays Smart

BOSTON -- With the ship date of its midrange storage systems still up in the air, EMC emphasized software on the opening day of its EMC World conference here today.

In his keynote speech, EMC CEO Joe Tucci mentioned new Clariions were coming without giving details, and there was no formal announcement of the new midrange systems. (See EMC Hiccups, Waits for Clariion and EMC, NetApp Ready New Wares.) Instead, today's news involved two products in the Smarts management family, Storage Insight for Availability and Application Discovery Manager.

The main focus was on Storage Insight for Availability, which extends root cause analysis to Fibre Channel SANs. Smarts, which was acquired by EMC in late 2004, built its reputation by identifying root causes of performance degradation or failure in IP networks. EMC rolled out Smarts IP Availability Manager for NAS last month. (See EMC Gets Smarts and EMC Smartens Its NAS.)

EMC says Storage Insight for Availability answers questions for IT customers faced with problems in the storage network. "It tells you what's wrong, what's impacted, and what's the result of the impact," says Chris Gahagan, SVP of resource management for EMC software.

The idea is to determine the root cause of a problem, then show the impact of the failure on specific business units. That leads to quicker diagnosis and repair of Fibre Channel SAN devices and points to the impact from a business sense. "It's very difficult in IT to understand the business impact of a fault or failure," Gahagan asserts.The concept isn't new. Startups Onaro and CentrePath do root cause analysis and CreekPath recently aimed its resource management features at business metrics. (See Onaro One-Ups SRM and CreekPath Tackles Biz Analytics.) EMC claims broader support because it performs root cause analysis across networking, SAN, and NAS devices. But for now, those capabilities are available only for customers using EMC storage and EMC Control Center (ECC) storage resource management (SRM) software.

The announcement didn't bring much traffic past the Smarts demo booth on the showroom floor, but visitors saw its benefits.

Scott Goldman, director of Unix systems and storage services for a cable network, says he's been frustrated by lack of root cause analysis in ECC and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView. He says the features EMC promises are exactly what he's been looking for.

"It's not enough to tell you something's not working," he says. "We need it to take the next steps and figure out why it's not working."

He says the business metrics will also come in handy. "Now we might get an alert saying IT lost 50 percent of its resources. But I want to know, How much did I lose from a business standpoint?" he says.Another user for a mortgage firm says she was interested in learning more about Storage Insight, mainly to alleviate an ECC problem. "ECC misses critical alerts," she says. "We're hoping this can fix that."

Storage Insight for Availability costs between $750 and $1,000 per terabyte. The second product announced today, Application Discovery Manager, is an appliance that monitors the relationships between a company's applications running on storage and network devices, and updates the relationships when they change. Pricing starts at about $220,000. Both products are available today.

In his opening talk, CEO Tucci called "systems resource management" one of two "game changers" for EMC. His other game-changing technology was virtualization -- VMware for servers, Invista for SAN, and Rainfinity for NAS.

The CEO's message was clearly aimed at removing the focus from EMC hardware -- including the unreleased Clariion. When he pointed out EMC spent $4.5 billion to acquire mostly software companies over the past few years, Tucci added, "We're not done. There are more companies on our hit list."

Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: