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EMC ControlCenter Expands Management Capabilities for Tiered Storage Environments

Posted on: Monday, 21 June 2004, 06:00 CDT

EMC Increases ControlCenter Functionality and Integration Across Tiered Storage, Network and Host Storage Resources

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, today announced significant enhancements to its flagship EMC ControlCenter(TM) family of integrated storage management software. Today's announcement extends the powerful capabilities of the world's leading storage management software to monitor, report, plan and provision resources across tiered storage environments to support customers' information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies.

Today's announcement also advances EMC's market leadership in storage resource management (SRM). In addition to support for EMC Symmetrix(R), EMC CLARiiON(R) and all other EMC storage platforms, EMC added more complete support for Hewlett-Packard, IBM and HDS storage systems; tighter integration with systems management frameworks; and open SMI-S standards support.

EMC enhanced ControlCenter's capability to monitor the health and utilization of multi-vendor environments with support for additional HDS, Hewlett-Packard and IBM open systems arrays and Linux hosts; new performance monitoring and reporting for HDS arrays and Linux hosts; and additional active management for Hewlett-Packard arrays.

EMC also announced tighter integration with enterprise management platforms. Users can now initiate ControlCenter functionality from within the systems management interface. For example, customers using BMC Software PATROL, CA Unicenter, HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli now can natively issue commands to ControlCenter applications such as EMC Automated Resource Manager(TM) (ARM), a member of the EMC ControlCenter family, for automated provisioning of heterogeneous storage resources.

Additionally, EMC announced it has completed the second phase of integration between ControlCenter and BMC Software's enterprise management solutions to provide customers with comprehensive, end-to-end management from a business perspective. Building on the Business Service Management (BSM) Foundation Partnership announced between EMC and BMC Software last October, the companies announced additional integration of ControlCenter and BMC Service Impact Manager to associate storage assets more tightly to business processes. Customers now benefit from additional automation of storage provisioning and improved productivity of storage management staff. Phase 1 integration, completed last July, enabled ControlCenter to send storage-specific events (e.g., capacity, performance and device availability warnings) to BMC Software's PATROL Enterprise Manager.

Finally, EMC announced the availability of the SNIA Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) support within the ControlCenter family of integrated storage management software. Through industry standards support, EMC extends its lead in providing a unified view and single point of control for the widest range of multi-vendor storage environments.

Matthias Link, IT Systems Administrator for T-Com, a Deutsche Telekom division and one of the largest fixed-network providers in Europe, said, "We're very excited that the new ControlCenter will allow us to manage our Symmetrix, CLARiiON, Centera, and HP XP512 from a single interface. With this multi-vendor view, we'll be able to significantly reduce the time and costs related to our storage management tasks. The software also reinforces our ILM strategy since we'll have more knowledge to use when deciding when to move our data and on what tiers of storage it should sit. All in all, we'll be able to make a huge leap in our storage management efficiency."

Dr. Juergen Steegborn, System Architect for Fiducia IT AG, Germany's full-service IT provider for more than 900 cooperative banks, said, "We have a diverse environment of 300 terabytes of storage on our EMC Symmetrix DMX, EMC CLARiiON CX, HDS and IBM ESS systems, as well as our Sun Solaris and IBM AIX servers. Before EMC ControlCenter, we used several different tools to patch together a view of our storage environment. Even then, we couldn't see it all. With ControlCenter, we'll be able to monitor and manage all of it from a single, integrated management tool. We'll educate our IT staff once and no longer require specialists for each management tool. We'll reduce our costs for storage administration staffing and training. And we'll gain faster access to better information, allowing us to get more value and usage out of our existing storage resources."

The latest version of ControlCenter enables Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., the subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc. responsible for publishing The Arizona Republic, to further streamline operations, improve storage asset utilization, maximize end-to-end performance and lower management costs.

Steve Gray, Systems Manager at Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., said, "EMC ControlCenter provides an integrated view of our overall infrastructure and enables us to place our data on the right storage at the right time. We no longer have to launch a variety of applications to evaluate our environment and gather spreadsheets to make critical decisions about our infrastructure. The more we can do with ControlCenter, the better. This is especially helpful in scaling our infrastructure and adding storage personnel because we only have to train them on one application. In addition, ControlCenter's multi-vendor storage management gives us the flexibility to roll in other vendors' storage for things like test and development."

Mark Lewis, Executive Vice President, EMC Software, said, "Today's announcement extends EMC's lead in the efficient monitoring, reporting, planning and provisioning of storage across growing and increasingly complex heterogeneous environments. As a key component for enabling information lifecycle management, EMC ControlCenter will play a central role in helping customers improve asset utilization and end-to-end performance management while streamlining their IT operations."

Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Storage Group, said, "The combination of our own hands-on testing and working with customers proved that EMC ControlCenter is easy to install and deploy, is scalable, and offers a reliable and powerful set of integrated applications. We have worked with customers who used ControlCenter to reduce tasks that once took days down to minutes, driving total cost of ownership down significantly. Additionally EMC has expanded ControlCenter's support of heterogeneous storage providing greater levels of choice and flexibility."

All new ControlCenter capabilities announced today are available immediately. See www.emc.com for specific third-party model support.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information storage and management that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Symmetrix and CLARiiON are registered trademarks, and EMC ControlCenter and Automated Resource Manager are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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