EMC Brings the Power of Automated Root Cause Analysis to Virtual Infrastructures with EMC Smarts Server Manager

New Software Simplifies Management of Virtualized Data Centers Helping Customers Increase IT Efficiencies, Improve Service Availability and Achieve Enhanced Policy-Based Service-Level Control and Compliance

Contacts

News Summary

HOPKINTON, Mass.– March 11, 2009–EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced EMC Smarts Server Manager – helping customers better manage the virtualized data centers of today and tomorrow by extending the power of automated root-cause analysis to virtual infrastructures. Complementing VMware management tools, customers benefit from greater levels of service availability in virtual and physical environments, enhanced policy-based service-level control and compliance, and improvements in overall IT efficiency.

As the newest addition to the EMC Smarts family of automated IT management solutions, Smarts Server Manager increases IT operations’ insight, control, and compliance across mixed infrastructure environments. Helping customers remove the complexity associated with managing these infrastructures, the solution provides automated discovery, root-cause analysis and business-impact assessment of VMware ESX servers hosts, virtual machines and applications.

“Customers worldwide are effectively leveraging the VMware platform to increase server utilization and decrease hardware costs. But the dynamic nature of these environments introduces new considerations for those trying to manage them,” said Bob Laliberte, Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Because VMware VMotion can rapidly move applications from one server to another to balance workloads, customers seek more efficient ways to manage certain manual tasks such as root-cause analysis, especially in large environments. Customers need solutions that automatically identify and isolate the location of virtual machines, as well as determine their relationships to other infrastructure elements and IT services. Only then can these management tasks happen in an automated fashion.”

“Virtualization continues to drive increased operational efficiency and reliability for companies across the globe,” said Shekar Ayyar, Vice President, Infrastructure Alliances, VMware. “When combined with the VMware platform, EMC Smarts Server Manager enables customers to more effectively manage their mixed virtual and physical infrastructures. Customers benefit from reduced capital and operating expenses and higher levels of application and infrastructure availability.”

Specifically, Smarts Server Manager enables customers to identify root cause issues across physical and virtual domains by extending the EMC Smarts Root Cause Analysis and Codebook Correlation technology to the virtual server environment. Through Smarts’ behavioral model, the solution is able to understand the relationships between virtual servers, physical servers and the network – and distinguish how symptoms are propagated to related infrastructure components.

“Virtual environments provide a wide range of cost benefits and the next opportunity is to help customers automate, manage, and gain control and compliance of the virtualized data center,” said Chris Gahagan, EMC’s Senior Vice President, Resource Management Software. “At EMC, we’re pursuing this opportunity head-on, providing solutions that manage across server, network, and storage domains – while enabling customers to maintain control and compliance over these infrastructures – to better manage the services the data center provides. EMC Smarts Server Manager solves a critical problem customers face today – root cause across physical and virtual domains – and positions them to manage the virtualized data center of tomorrow.”

In addition to extending automated discovery, root–cause analysis, and business–impact assessment, Smarts Server Manager can:

• Monitor the health of Microsoft Cluster Services and Veritas Cluster Servers
• Help IT Operations identify when key application or service processes are unavailable
• Extend IT’s ability to maintain service availability and performance policies and service–level control and compliance across their physical, virtual and mixed IT environments
• Integrate with server hardware monitoring suites from IBM, Dell, and Sun to identify when servers are operating in a degraded state

Smarts Server Manager is a critical piece of EMC’s resource management software portfolio, providing advanced solutions enabling customers to automate their data center operations. With a unique set of products designed to help customers cut costs while continually improving service delivery, EMC’s products conduct comprehensive discovery, compliance, analysis, automation and visualization across the physical and virtual infrastructure and applications throughout the data center.

This automation process enables companies to discover what IT resources they have, check for IT compliance to policies, isolate root-cause problems, and fix any issues. Leveraging this model-based, intelligent software, customers can take a service-centric approach to IT management and gain insight into how their information infrastructures support key business services.

Smarts Server Manager is available now and is priced based on discovery and availability management per domain, as well as the number of devices being managed in each domain.

For more information on EMC’s resource management portfolio please visit www.emcitmanagement.com.

Photos

Virtualization Use-Case: Managing the Virtual Environment

Virtualization Use-Case: VMotion

Chris Gahagan, EMC's Senior Vice President, Resource Management Software

Click Here for More Photos

About EMC