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EMC gets smart analysis tools

Fruits of the Smarts acquisition

EMC World EMC is launching two products to help assess storage problems across SAN environments, the company said at the EMC World Conference in Boston.

Smarts Storage Insight for Availability and Smarts Application Discovery Manager each map different elements of the complex environments that result from SANs (Storage Area Networks) and virtualisation. The products are extensions of the Smarts technology purchased by EMC at the end of 2004.

Insight for Availability uses data from EMC's ControlCentre to map storage elements across a network and their dependencies. Using this information, systems managers can pinpoint the root causes of system failures or assess the impact of changes made to the network. EMC vice president of resource management Chris Gahagan said: "You may have a single fault in a domain and that one problem will cause a storm of alerts everywhere - so you won't know exactly where the problem is. The result is the launch of a lot of manual, time-consuming processes to diagnose the root cause."

Insight is aimed at automating the correlation of these alarms to diagnose the root problem. This, Gahagan claims, will reduce the impact of failures and resolve trouble tickets faster. Similarly, if changes are planned, a SAN environment can be analysed to determine the impact these changes may have beyond the immediate domain.

To a similar end, EMC is releasing Application Discovery Manager to create an interactive, real-time model of applications running across a network and their interdependencies.

The need for such a tool is becoming imperative in SAN environments because of the increasingly complex and constantly changing interconnections that develop between the originating application, CRM (customer relationship management) and other data analysis tools. Gahagan said these interactions between applications and data create complex webs across the hardware infrastructure and the cause of failures can be hard to pinpoint. ®

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