4 new EMC offerings aim to ease IT service management

EMC on Monday was to unveil a slew of products that the company says will help enterprise IT managers analyze compliance, IPv6 networks, automate IT processes and generate performance reports.

At the ITSMF USA Fusion 07 conference in Charlotte, N.C., the company plans to introduce four products each with a function designed to ease IT service management for enterprise network managers: IT compliance Manager; IPv6 Availability Manager; IT Process Centre; and IT Performance Reporter. The products are designed to address specific pain points in the enterprise, but also the software is part of EMC's larger strategy to deliver data-center automation and IT services across domains. With competition such as HP and IBM, EMC says it is ramping up its product set to deliver management and automation across IT domains.

"The products are moving up the stack and leveraging the strength of our discovery, modeling and application-dependency mapping to help customers develop an infrastructure information strategy," says Jon Siegal, a senior manager in EMC's Resource Management Software Group. "Customers need shared services around storing, protecting and optimizing their infrastructure."

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EMC on Monday was to unveil a slew of products that the company says will help enterprise IT managers analyze compliance, IPv6 networks, automate IT processes and generate performance reports.

At the ITSMF USA Fusion 07 conference in Charlotte, N.C., the company plans to introduce four products each with a function designed to ease IT service management for enterprise network managers: IT compliance Manager; IPv6 Availability Manager; IT Process Centre; and IT Performance Reporter. The products are designed to address specific pain points in the enterprise, but also the software is part of EMC's larger strategy to deliver data-center automation and IT services across domains. With competition such as HP and IBM, EMC says it is ramping up its product set to deliver management and automation across IT domains.

"The products are moving up the stack and leveraging the strength of our discovery, modeling and application-dependency mapping to help customers develop an infrastructure information strategy," says Jon Siegal, a senior manager in EMC's Resource Management Software Group. "Customers need shared services around storing, protecting and optimizing their infrastructure."

For instance, IT Compliance Analyzer is packaged as an appliance and uses EMC's Application Discovery Manager (ADM) software as the management data repository, which EMC says helps customers ensure application changes, configurations and dependences comply with preset policies or standards laid out by industry regulations such as the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard.

ADM, based on technology EMC acquired with nLayers, gives IT managers an inventory of their data centers' applications and hosts and shows them how the elements are interdependent. Incorporating ADM technology into the compliance software to discover changes in real-time and ensure compliance. IT Compliance Analyzer is able to alert IT staff to policy violations in real time, EMC says.

IT Compliance Analyzer is expected to be available next month, and pricing is based on the number of managed servers, starting at $27,000.

EMC will also announce its foray into run-book automation, and the company plans to start with automation storage requests and other storage-related tasks. IT Process Centre provides IT process automation and can identify available storage resources. For instance, the software will let application owners enter requests for storage capacity and the software will ensure the steps needed to provision resources are taken in the proper order.

The product includes process modeling software and a studio application in which IT managers develop workflows. It includes a repository of processes and a portal from which IT managers can view reports, task lists, dashboards and diagnosis. IT Process Centre integrates with EMC ControlCenter, and the company says it will address server, application and network domains in future releases. IT Process Centre is available now and pricing starts at $150,000.