Reinforcing its continued innovation in delivering one of the market's leading automated network and IT operations management solutions, EMC Corporation has announced key enhancements to its flagship IT infrastructure monitoring and analysis portfolio, EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence (formerly Smarts).
The new technologies provide core network management functionality to help customers transition from a physical to virtual IT infrastructure - and eventually - a private cloud model.
“As companies continue to virtualise their IT infrastructures, they are excited by the cost efficiency and agility this model may bring,” said Jim Frey, research director, Enterprise Management Associates.
“The real roadblock is 'how are we going to manage this new infrastructure?' To smooth the virtualisation transition and truly achieve its potential advantages, they need automated IT management solutions that enable them to discover all of the dynamic elements and relationships while also rapidly identifying and resolving the root-cause of failures and degradations. With EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, EMC is taking a major step forward in helping customers achieve this goal.”
Inana Nkanza, country manager EMC Southern Africa, said key to the announcement is integrated network configuration and operations management capabilities and expanded virtualisation support.
“With more than 60% of outages caused by misconfigurations, the correlation of root-cause analysis issues with network change history is essential. By integrating Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence with EMC Ionix Network Configuration Manager (formerly Voyence), customers can avoid network configuration issues and also correlate device outages to recent change activity for faster resolution,” said Nkanza.
“EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence is truly a revolutionary solution in network management, helping our clients power their integrated infrastructure management (IIM) initiatives,” said Michael Cruise, Managing Solution Director for CompuCom - a leading IT outsourcing specialist providing infrastructure management, application development, architecture and governance services, and procurement, deployment, and maintenance of hardware and software. “By leveraging such innovations as the new integration points between the network configuration and IT operations management solutions from Ionix, CompuCom has been able to realise nearly a 10% gain in operational efficiency operation and approximately $550 000 in savings during the first year of its implementation.”
Other key enhancements to the solution suite include:
Expanded Virtualisation Support: Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence is now able to automate the root-cause analysis and impact assessment across an expanded range of virtual infrastructures. The solution can automatically discover VMware ESX Servers or Microsoft Hyper-V Servers, mapping their relationships to virtual machines and the rest of the infrastructure. Ionix can continuously monitor their availability and performance to improve IT service delivery, simplify virtual management complexities, holistically manage virtualised infrastructures across domains, and increase both IT service availability and IT operations efficiency. Additionally, the newest version of the EMC Ionix IP Management Suite now enables the solution to be deployed on virtual machines.
* Next-Generation Performance and Analytics Management: Through key partnerships, Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence is now able to provide performance monitoring and correlation to complement EMC's existing availability monitoring and correlation. This enables customers to pinpoint the root-cause of both availability and performance issues in an integrated fashion to immediately determine their business impact.
* Improved Scale and Performance: The software also delivers faster discovery over high-latency networks, representing a 20% performance improvement over previous versions.
“EMC Ionix allows Interoute to proactively monitor its IP network and respond to customer issues in a timely manner. Interoute has leveraged their investment in EMC Ionix by using it as an alarm aggregator for all its network events,” said Chris Pinnock, Director, Software Development, Interoute Communications Limited - owner operator of Europe's most advanced and densely connected voice and data network, encompassing over 55 000km of lit fibre with eight hosting data centres and 32 co-location centres. “Because of its design, Interoute has been able to easily extend EMC Ionix and integrate it with its CRM system for ticketing, its inventory system for impact and, more recently, its business intelligence system for reporting. This work has largely been done in-house and at a low cost.”
“The IT Operations centre is at the front lines of the data centre, ensuring the reliability and availability of core IT services. The ability to effectively monitor and manage the IT environment - proactively identifying and responding to problems - significantly impacts the quality of service customers experience, as well as the costs related to delivering and maintaining those services,” said Jay Mastaj, General Manager and Senior Vice-President, EMC Ionix. “With the rise in virtualisation and the increased complexity of IT environments, customers demand a new approach that shifts the burden of monitoring and management away from people and manual processes and into automated analytical systems. EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence is that solution.”
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