EMC ControlCenter Customers Adopting SRM for VMware Infrastructure

As part of this announcement, EMC strengthened its SRM offering by introducing enhancements to its industry leading change and configuration management and root cause analysis applications: EMC SAN Advisor and EMC Smarts Storage Insight for Availability. The company also formally announced its ControlCenter user community.

ControlCenter is a leading SRM solution for managing discovery, problems, compliance, change and reporting in both virtualized and physical server environments. The ControlCenter family simplifies the most complex information infrastructures, enabling customers to improve productivity, increase performance, and lower storage management costs.

Core to today’s announcement is the increased adoption of EMC ControlCenter due to the software’s comprehensive support for VMware Infrastructure, including discovery, provisioning, and reporting of storage resources for VMware ESX Server hosts and guest servers – fully enabling SRM in virtual environments. EMC ControlCenter 6.0 fully complements VMware’s VirtualCenter software by providing end-to-end relationship and topology views – from a VMware guest to array devices.  Since its introduction in May, nearly 1,000 ControlCenter customers have successfully adopted and implemented Version 6.0.

As EMC experiences increased adoption of ControlCenter, it is also announcing the release of EMC SAN Advisor 6.0 and EMC Smarts Storage Insight for Availability 2.0. With SAN Advisor 6.0, ControlCenter users gain access to a newly enhanced SAN validation and design tool featuring support for end-to-end path validation in applying SAN best practices for high availability.  These enhancements enable customers to more easily fine-tune both new and existing SANs for interoperability, device configuration and high availability – while reducing risks associated with implementing changes in the SAN.

Smarts Storage Insight for Availability works with ControlCenter to fully automate root-cause and impact analysis of availability problems across Server, IP LAN and SAN infrastructures. The software leverages data and topology from ControlCenter and Smarts to auto-discover SAN and IP network elements and their inter-relationships. The built-in analysis engine automatically identifies the impact of failures on related infrastructure elements, including host devices, file systems EMC PowerPath logical paths, SAN components, storage arrays and network-attached storage systems and file shares. With the introduction of Version 2.0, Storage Insight for Availability expands coverage to storage arrays and NAS devices from Hitachi, HP, and Network Appliance and introduces improved fault isolation models.

"EMC is one company that continually proves its dedication to innovation in the storage management space," said Vanna Sun, PMP, Storage Product Manager at Pitney Bowes/Wipro Technologies. "The company was first to introduce software capable of automating root-cause analysis across the SAN, was first-to-market with the ability to manage VMware environments, and continues to advance homogeneous support, flexibility and ease-of-use of its core EMC ControlCenter 6.0 product family. These are just three of many examples of EMC proving its principle leadership and vision for storage management."

Additionally, EMC today formally unveiled its new user support community for ControlCenter. This EMC-backed, user-led consortium includes 12 user groups across the United States and EMEA – with the goal of building scalable communities for managing knowledge-sharing between EMC customers. With 349 active customer participants, the consortium has held 28 regional events since 2005 and has logged a 20 percent attendee increase at each meeting.

"When we first joined the EMC ControlCenter user community, our hope was to leverage best-practice discussions, sharing ideas to overcome some of the challenges associated with managing our highly complex storage environment," said Tom Gregory, Senior Systems Engineer at Raymond James Financial. "Now, holding a regular schedule of events for its 350 active members, EMC is doing a great job of taking this initiative to the next level – offering exceptional value-add to its expanding base of EMC ControlCenter customers."

“With the official launch of our new user community and our first to market support for virtual, physical and mixed server environments, EMC ControlCenter continues to reinforce its position as the world’s leading SRM solution for the enterprise,” said EMC Software’s Senior Vice President, Resource Management, Chris Gahagan. “Add to this our recent introductions of such game-changing storage management technologies like EMC IT Process Centre and becomes clear why EMC is continually recognized as the share and technology leader in the competitive SRM marketplace.”

ControlCenter is a key component of EMC’s Resource Management product portfolio. EMC Resource Management products enable thousands of midsize and large enterprises to monitor, report and provision their information infrastructures to improve service levels and optimize network and storage utilization. EMC’s storage, network and application management products are widely recognized as the leading applications for resource management.

EMC Corporation