Enhancements to EMC ProSphere

EMC Corporation announced enhancements to EMC ProSphere storage resource management software, enabling customers to understand how capacity is being used, track consumption trends to know when more storage will be required, and receive automated alerts across the storage environment to identify issues and quickly assess their impact-in 2 clicks.

The new capacity dashboards and reporting capabilities also feature new integration with EMC FAST VP. As enterprises remain focused on controlling the cost of rapid data growth, technologies like ProSphere and EMC FAST VP help increase utilization, reduce storage costs, improve performance levels, and create a more agile IT environment.
 
ProSphere enables IT transformation in both physical and virtual worlds, allowing customers to manage IT-as-a-Service by monitoring and analyzing service levels from end-to-end.

ProSphere enables customers to:

• Visualize relationships and application dependencies across physical and virtual environment: It enables users to understand the complex relationships and dependencies between applications and storage services. This includes the ability to quickly spot performance, availability and configuration issues to identify situations that could impact service levels. ProSphere’s federated architecture consolidates the view to a single pane of glass across data center sites.
• Analyze storage services to improve services levels: It helps customers quickly analyze and troubleshoot performance issues from the virtual guest down through the storage layers. It automatically tracks changes and analyzes compliance with configuration best practices and interoperability guidelines to ensure the environment is configured to meet service level expectations. It also enables users to analyze alerts to quickly assess impact and take action.
• Optimize the storage infrastructure: It provides customers with the tools to optimize their storage infrastructure to better control storage costs. It tracks where and how capacity is consumed by service level, location and array. It helps administrators find available and reclaimable capacity to increase utilization. Trending analysis improves planning processes to ensure the right tier of capacity, at the right time, in the right location to meet business objectives. Integration with FAST VP allows customers to expand their use of this technology to further optimize their investments in EMC storage.

New Integration with FAST VP
FAST VP allows IT to take a policy-based approach toward delivering IT as a service. With data growing, it is being adopted by EMC customers because of its ability to improve performance and efficiency. New integration between ProSphere and FAST VP automatically tracks the consumption of virtual pools to identify when new capacity will be required. This facilitates just-in-time purchasing to lower storage acquisition costs. It also displays performance trends from the virtual or physical host to virtual storage devices to identify the impact of FAST VP at the application level enabling organizations to make more effective storage tiering decisions. This enhances IT’s ability to lower costs while meeting and or exceeding service level objectives.

ProSphere’s federated and scalable architecture-with the ability to manage more than 1.1 million volumes, 36,000 SAN ports, and 18,000 hosts-is designed to scale to meet the needs of small enterprises to the world’s largest data centers. ProSphere’s user interface is optimized to improve productivity in growing environments that are rapidly adopting virtualization. Extensive end-to-end visualization in physical and virtual environments helps storage teams understand application to storage dependencies across their data center.   

Sarel Theron, Storage Administrator, Internet Solutions, said: "ProSphere’s user interface is clean, simple to navigate and relevant. You experience this at first logon with a dashboard that presents you with a Storage Administrator’s most important information at his finger tips."  

George Nye, Storage & Data Protection Services Engineer III, Hospital of Saint Raphael, said: "The capacity views are extensive, they let me know exactly what I have, how it’s used, and with the trending analysis clearly shows when I need to make the next storage purchase."  

Hatem Naguib, Vice President, Alliances, VMware, said: "ProSphere’s integration with VMware vSphere® provides storage administrators with a holistic view of their storage infrastructure. Being able to quickly understand application dependencies, resource utilization and service levels-and take action in just a few clicks-is important. ProSphere in a VMware environment will enable customers to control the cost of storage while improving storage levels."

Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "As enterprise customers’ virtual environments flourish, they need an SRM solution-like EMC ProSphere–that assures storage service levels across the virtual infrastructure, controls the cost of capacity growth, and optimizes storage services to align with business objectives."

Jay Mastaj, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMC Infrastructure Management Group, said: "Our customers’ biggest challenge today is controlling the costs of rapid data growth, while ensuring consistent service levels in both physical and virtual environments. EMC is committed to helping customers transform their IT infrastructures, and a huge piece of this is managing growth while reducing complexity. The new capacity dashboards and reporting in ProSphere will enhance customers’ ability to control the costs of rapid data growth.  Integration with VMware and FAST VP will help organizations get the most of their investments in EMC storage as they expand their use of virtualization. And, the new monitoring capabilities will allow organizations to understand the health and performance of their storage infrastructure."