EMC SRM Suite Improves Application-to-Storage Service Level Management for Cloud

EMC Corporation announced the EMC Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite, delivering storage and application administrators application-to-storage management for cloud environments.

For instance, now storage administrators can view what their Oracle or SQL Server counterparts are concerned about – enabling common insight and alignment of priorities to improve the efficiency and simplify management of the overall IT environment. The suite optimizes resource investments, enabling customers to move to more agile, cloud-enabled environments.

The SRM Suite is a storage management suite comprised of EMC ProSphere, Storage Configuration Advisor and Watch4net, the most recent addition to its portfolio, providing improved reporting flexibility. It will provide performance, capacity and configuration management for EMC arrays – including VMAX, EMC VNX, EMC VPLEX, Isilon, and DataDomain – as well as select third party storage arrays for both file and block. 

Virtualization enables businesses of all sizes to simplify management, control costs and guarantee uptime. However, virtualized environments also add layers of complexity to the IT infrastructure that reduce visibility and can complicate the management of storage resources. The SRM Suite attacks these layers by providing visibility into the physical and virtual relationships, to ensure consistent service levels. As customers build out their cloud infrastructure, the SRM Suite will help organizations ensure service levels while optimizing IT resources – both key attributes of cloud deployments.

Key features of the SRM Suite include:

• Dynamic real-time reporting: increased visibility of all resources and performance dependencies from the application to the host, down to the storage array.
• Metric correlation: analyze application performance through trending and threshold notifications and correlate these with storage metrics.
• Service-level compliance: manage and respond to service-level deviations through custom thresholds and dashboards across heterogeneous storage.
• FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) optimization: analyze the usage of FAST to meet customer-defined performance and chargeback policies by application.
• Storage service alignment: analyze storage workload trends to align storage tiers to application service levels.
• Configuration compliance: automatically validate configurations, leveraging the EMC Support Matrix and customer-defined design best practices.

Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "The EMC SRM Suite is helping customers continue to transform themselves into cloud-enabled businesses simply and cost-effectively. Companies need to ensure that the appropriate service levels are being delivered to a wide range of applications, even with rapidly growing, changing and complex IT environments. With the SRM Suite, EMC is helping businesses understand the big picture of how storage impacts their applications-a critical ability for any company with highly virtualized/cloud environments."

Johan Marais, storage and virtualization administrator, Discovery Holding, LTD., said: "The combination of these three products will allow us to have a full 360 degree view of our storage infrastructure. ProSphere has given us great insight into our current storage environment capacity and performance wise. Adding Storage Configuration Advisor will allow us to have a better hold on storage changes and assist us in applying recommended standards. Completing the solution with Watch4net will give us sight into application health and performance all the way to the storage layer allowing us to adhere to stricter SLA’s."

Sarel Theron, senior SAN engineer, Cloud Data Management, Internet Solutions, said: "With the rapid data growth we are experiencing, we must understand our existing as well as future workloads to make sure we are applying the right technology to meet service levels. To do so, we have to understand the relationships, dependencies and impact of systems connecting to storage in real-time. We need one of those ‘vital signs’ monitors you get in a hospital connected to our SAN. EMC’s new SRM Suite appears to be just that."

Amitabh Srivastava, president, Advanced Storage Division, EMC, said: "By analyzing performance, capacity and configuration compliance in a simple and easy-to-manage suite, EMC is offering customers a better way to maximize their storage investments. As organizations adopt cloud enabling technologies like VMware and FAST VP to create a more agile infrastructure, this new suite provides the visibility and control that ensure application service levels while optimizing storage resources to control costs. It also gives customers the flexibility to manage EMC or third party arrays with file or block storage."

Availability
The EMC SRM Suite is available worldwide through EMC and channel partners with support for VMAX, VNX and select third party arrays. EMC VPLEX, Isilon and DataDomain will be supported in an upcoming release.