“It’s our strongly held belief that in order to enable customers to
EMC also adjusted ControlCenter to work through the systems management
EMC closely aligned its storage management software with
its information lifecycle management strategy (ILM) Monday by
refreshing its ControlCenter suite to better care for storage resources
across tiered environments.
The Hopkinton, Mass., information systems maker created ControlCenter 5.2
with new storage resource management (SRM) features
that monitor, report and provision resources. SRM software helps increase
operational efficiency and improve storage asset utilization.
With these enhancements, EMC has spruced up ControlCenter’s ability to gauge
the health status of environments with gear from several vendors, including
more complete support for HP , IBM
and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)
storage systems, according to Dennis Hoffman, vice
president of software marketing at EMC.
Hoffman, who joined the company in February after EMC quietly bought
Storigen Systems, the SRM software company he co-founded, said ControlCenter
also boasts tighter integration with systems management frameworks and open
SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) standards support.
implement information lifecycle management, their infrastructure has to
become information aware,” Hoffman told internetnews.com. “SRM
delivers an operations management capability for ILM.”
For EMC, ILM includes content management, data movement, protection and
recovery, tiered storage and information management, all with ControlCenter
software as the cornerstone, Hoffman said. The executive maintained that
many EMC customers start with a combination of SRM and tiered storage
because it is a logical entry level to ILM.
Enterprise Storage Group Senior Analyst Tony Asaro, who has tested the
software, pronounced 5.2 stable, noting that ControlCenter has evolved from
a set of point products that managed purely EMC arrays to a unified software
application that supports products from multiple vendors.
Specifically, EMC has enhanced ControlCenter’s monitoring and reporting for
additional HDS, HP and IBM arrays and Linux hosts. The SRM planning and
provisioning component has been revised to better help customers design,
plan and provision multi-vendor tiered storage with SAN management support
for HP, HDS, and Cisco products.
interface. For example, customers using products such as BMC Software’s PATROL, CA
Unicenter, HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli
now can automatically provision ControlCenter applications, a sign of
increased heterogeneity for EMC.
Hoffman also said ControlCenter 5.2 is EMC’s first software product that is
compliant with SMI-S, thus paving the way for a unified window and access control into multiple vendors’
products.
ControlCenter 5.2, which comes nine months after the last upgrade, is free
for existing customers under maintenance. The ControlCenter GUI
and repository come free with the applications that comprise it. Each of
those management software applications has its own tiered pricing.
The upgrades come a week after research firm IDC branded
EMC the leader in storage software, including a healthy 51.2 percent share
of the total SRM market. Moreover, SRM software grew at the most rapid clip
in the first quarter of 2004, posting a 32.4 percent gain for the period.
At its meeting with financial analysts last week, EMC said it
expects to grow its software revenues to $1.5 billion for 2004.
EMC Ties ControlCenter to ILM
