EMC ProSphere Transforms Storage Management Across Physical and VMware Virtualized Environments

HOPKINTON, Mass., March 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

News Summary:

• Today EMC announced enhancements to EMC^® ProSphere™ storage resource management software.  Now—in just 2-clicks—EMC ProSphere enables IT organizations to understand capacity usage and trends, identify issues and assess impact, and analyze performance across physical and VMware virtualized environments.
• EMC ProSphere now supports EMC FAST VP™ (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools), enabling customers to improve storage utilization through intuitive capacity dashboards and reporting, while proactively monitoring capacity consumption and service levels.  
• EMC ProSphere has extended its monitoring and alerting capabilities, which now aggregates alerts from EMC Symmetrix VMAX/VMAXe and EMC VNX unified storage arrays, and displays the context required to quickly assess the impact to meet storage service levels.
• EMC ProSphere enables administrators to visualize, analyze and optimize the storage environment to easily transform storage management and ensure consistent, timely, and cost-effective access to information.

Full Story:

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today 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 just 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 EMC 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: ProSphere 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:  ProSphere 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 always configured to meet service level expectations. It also enables users to analyze alerts to quickly assess impact and take action. 
• Optimize the storage infrastructure: ProSphere 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. Tight 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

EMC FAST VP allows IT to take a policy-based approach toward delivering IT as a service.  With data growing rapidly, FAST VP is being adopted (see related news release) 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 significantly 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 intuitive 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.    

Customer Quotes

Sarel Theron, Storage Administrator, Internet Solutions 

"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 

"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."  

Partner Quote

Hatem Naguib, Vice President, Alliances, VMware

"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."

Industry Analyst Quote

Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group

"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."

EMC Executive Quote

Jay Mastaj, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMC Infrastructure Management Group

"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."  

Additional Resources:

• Read the ProSphere data sheet
• Hear the EMC video
• Read the Enterprise Strategy Group paper
• Read the Managed View blog
• Watch the Enterprise Strategy Group video

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, FAST VP, and ProSphere are either registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks herein are the property of their respective holders. VMware and VMware vSphereare registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship with VMware or any other company.

Forward-Looking Statement

This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under the Federal Securities Laws.  Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (v) component and product quality and availability; (vi) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (viii) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (ix) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xii) threats and other disruptions to our secure data centers or networks; (xiii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (xiv) war or acts of terrorism; and (xv) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

SOURCE EMC Corporation