EMC Webs Up SAN Tools

With two Web-based enhancements to its ControlCenter software management platform today, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) claims it has taken a step closer to offering customers an automated, single interface for viewing and controlling all of their storage-related information (see EMC Takes ECC to the Web).

"Were automating the whole process," says Pat Cassidy, a marketing director at EMC. "We’re driving towards a single-pane-of-glass view."

But as usual, EMC's promise of storage management nirvana tends to work best if you've got only EMC hardware -- although the company says this will change later in the year.

The first of the enhancements to EMC's management platform is the template-driven, subscription-based SAN Architect. This tool aims to guide IT administrators through the design and modeling of SANs, thus reducing the risk and time associated with this process. It ensures that proposed changes are accurate and precise by modeling and validating hosts, host bus adapters, switches, and storage arrays.

"Having capabilities like this gives EMC the possibility of moving up the stack," says Enterprise Storage Group Inc. analyst Steve Kenniston. "They’re spelling out the interoperability matrix before it's rolled out."SAN novices can simply plug in what their existing infrastructure looks like and how much additional storage they need, Cassidy says, and the SAN Architect offers a long list of suggestions and different possible combinations. The tool is also useful for experts, he says, pointing out that it dramatically reduces the time and risk associated with making changes to the SAN infrastructure.

Radian Group Inc., a finance company that has been beta testing the tool, says it reduced the time needed for modeling and verifying changes to the SAN from 24 hours to four.

"This produces recommendations that solve a particular problem," Cassidy says. "It shows what you have today, what the proposed changes are, and validates that it will work."

However, EMC says that the SAN Architect currently works with Clariion, older Symmetrix, and new DMXs -- in other words, only EMC products. Toward the end of this year, the company says it plans to add the possibility to configure in other companies’ arrays.

Despite the fact that SAN Architect only works with EMC gear, Kenniston says Hopkinton is ahead of the curve. The only other company offering anything similar, he says, is Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA) through its recent acquisition of Netreon Inc. (see CA Nets Netreon).EMC's other new software management tool, AutoAdvice, expands ControlCenter’s existing reporting and monitoring capabilities to servers, databases, and applications. The tool is able to remotely monitor system metrics for Windows, Unix, and Linux servers and operating systems; Oracle and SQL Server databases; and Exchange and SAP applications. It then sends the data back to a central EMC database, where it is processed and analyzed and sent back to the customer via email as usable information. In the emails, EMC flags trends and metrics either as "informational," "warning," or "critical." The company also provides advice on what to do about the problem. Customers can also access the information on an EMC Web page.

"This technology can get rolled out in half a day and starts working immediately," says Cassidy, who insists that EMC’s AutoAdvice is unique. "There are a lot of companies that will collect the data for you, but that’s just raw data... We take all that raw data and turn it back to you as information and suggest where you should look first." Even before launching the product today, EMC already had a couple dozen paying customers for this product, Cassidy says.

More important than just monitoring is EMC’s claim that the tool isolates emerging performance trends before they hit operations, says Enterprise Storage Group analyst Nancy Marrone. "The key to this is that they actually correlate this information from all of the enterprises they are managing, so they have a very significant knowledge base," she says. "EMC can then offer customers a significant range of advice. That would not be possible if the customer were just monitoring their own enterprise."

Both products are available now on a one-year subscription basis, and can be used on their own, or as a part of the overall ControlCenter platform, EMC says.

AutoAdvice is available for anything from a single CPU up to a global installation, with a list price starting at $400 per CPU. As customers scale up, adding the AutoAdvice to more and more CPUs, EMC says it offers them deep discounts on the price. A one-year subscription for the SAN Architect, meanwhile, starts at $2,400.— Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Byte and Switch