New open software developments from EMC

EMC has announced various enhancements to the EMC ControlCenter family of integrated management software and a new hosted EMC application monitoring offering.

"EMC ControlCenter is a fully integrated networked storage management family," says Alex Robertson, country systems engineering and professional services manager at EMC South Africa. "It comprises integrated applications that leverage a shared infrastructure to easily manage multi-vendor storage environments including storage devices, storage networks and server-based storage resources."

The first major enhancement to the ControlCenter package is the incorporation of EMC`s Automated Resource Manager, an end-to-end automated storage provisioning software that automates the manual process of adding and reallocating storage resources - from the storage array through the storage area network (SAN) to the host computer.

"The software enables organisations to bypass the costly, error-prone manual process by defining and applying storage service-levels for specific application requirements and creating heterogeneous storage pools based on geography, application and functional organisation," says Robertson.

SAN Manager, formerly ESN Manager, now supports active management of HP StorageWorks arrays, in addition to prior active management support for EMC Symmetrix and EMC CLARiiON. It also centrally manages network devices such as Brocade, McDATA, Qlogic and EMC Connectrix and enables zoning, discovery and reporting for storage arrays from HDS, HP and Sun.

"SAN Manager leverages the ControlCenter shared infrastructure to integrate seamlessly with other storage management applications as well as to integrate with framework products such as HP OpenView, Tivoli Netview, Computer Associates Unicenter and Micromuse NetCool," he adds.

EMC StorageScope, a storage reporting software with full end-to-end correlation of utilisation for storage devices, switches and server storage resources, now also provides an access interface to the data contained in the shared ControlCenter repository, enabling users to create customised resource utilisation reports and to export StorageScope data to other applications.

The company`s Common Array Manager enables customers to automatically discover multi-vendor storage arrays and monitor the status of the array, its disks and other sub-components.

Having previously supported storage from HP, HDS, Sun, IBM and StorageTek, the Common Array Manager device management software now also supports arrays from Network Appliance.

"When talking about storage, we need to proactively evaluate our capacity needs, coordinate multiple management steps among staff, and rely on tools that can automate the whole process," says Robertson . "EMC ControlCenter and new integrated applications will prove extremely valuable in this process."