DataBridge Enterprise Management Tool

At EMC World 2012, EMC Corp. announced a new enterprise management tool, DataBridge, which empowers IT operations teams with ‘single-pane of glass’ management to build customizable dashboards for delivering ITaaS.

As customers continue to transform their IT infrastructures, they require powerful-yet simple-new ways to better manage their growing virtual data centers.

With DataBridge, which will be available later this year, customers will have real-time IT infrastructure management data at their finger-tips. It will mashup management information to increase infrastructure visibility, improving overall IT operations management and investment decisions across both physical and virtual environments.

Traditional IT infrastructure management software provides deep, detailed insights into compute, storage and network, however these insights only represent a specific view of what’s happening within the datacenter. With DataBridge, customers can break down these silos, combining and relating this infrastructure management data in a way that provides a more complete multi-dimensional view of their infrastructure.

DataBridge will support EMC ProSphere, EMC Data Protection Advisor, EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager, EMC IT Operations Intelligence Suite, EMC Storage Configuration Advisor and EMC AppSync, in addition to non-EMC data sources. This enables customers and partners to build DataBridge widgets that combine the data from these products with other EMC management software and customer data sources in new ways for increased visibility.

DataBridge will include the DataBridge studio, an enterprise mashup environment where customers will go to build DataBridge widget. With it, customers can build and add new DataBridge widgets to their DataBridge library to share with others in the organization. It enables customers to automate the collection and consolidation of IT data from various sources, filter that data with business logic and add visualizations, all packaged in use-case specific DataBridge widgets. With a few clicks, IT operation teams can build and modify dashboards from a library of pre-built widgets that can be dragged-and-dropped into their dashboard.  

Technology Highlights:
DataBridge integrates IT operations data, embeds business logic and generates rich interactive dashboards in new ways, enabling customers to:

Leverage Existing Investments

• Tap into existing data sources to bridge existing IT data silos with DataBridge studio to build DataBridge widgets by combining data from EMC and third party solutions using REST APIs, SOAP and JAVA programmable interfaces, XML, Microsoft SQL, SharePoint lists and Excel files.
• Add value by repurposing IT management data and present key performance indicators in real-time.

Visualize IT Infrastructure Data in New Ways

• DataBridge widgets combine one or more data sources with business logic to create powerful visualizations that are otherwise generally labor intensive.
• DataBridge widgets for storage metering include DataBridge Storage Chargeback, which deliver detailed usage visualizations, and DataBridge Resource Analysis, which delivers detailed utilization across both primary and backup storage gathered from EMC ProSphere and EMC Data Protection Advisor.

Customize Dashboard Preferences

• DataBridge dashboards are customized by dragging and dropping DataBridge widgets from the DataBridge widget library.
• The power of dashboards is the ability for customers to create visualizations based on their individual requirements for monitoring key performance indicators in real-time. At any time dashboards can be modified to adjust to changing needs.

EMC Global Services accelerates IT transformation at every phase of the services lifecycle, and solutions such as DataBridge have the potential to further advance these services through technology design, deployment, optimization, operations management, education, and customer support. In addition, EMC ISVs, service providers, and partners who provide customization services, will all be able to leverage DataBridge to expand their service offerings.

Jason Buffington, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "EMC DataBridge delivers visibility across a business’ IT infrastructure in both the physical and virtual environments-providing customers with integrated dashboards, and analytics with better visibility across the organization. These new capabilities-combined with EMC’s storage and infrastructure solutions, and the ability to include third party data sources-create valuable new opportunities for companies looking to exploit and leverage real-time data from their cloud environment."

Jay Mastaj, SVP and GM, EMC Infrastructure Management Group, said: "Businesses today are bombarded with so much information from many different sources. An average IT Operations professional manages data across hundreds of networks, storage arrays, firewalls and applications, each with its own management tool and data source. Manual processes are no longer viable in today’s world of instant business decisions. Our vision is to continue developing these types of solutions to help our customers move their crucial data and business operations to the cloud environments."