EMC Updating Smarts to V9.1

EMC Corporation announced enhancements its Smarts software, extending in managing virtual data centers and cloud environments.

Smarts 9.1 now includes root-cause and impact analysis for all VMware vSphere attached storage through new and enhanced integrations with VMware vCenter Server and the EMC SRM Suite. The software enables users to visualize and understand storage and VM relationships and dependencies in both physical and virtual data centers-and is a leading solution capable of correlating VMware DRS and SDRS (Distributed Resources Scheduler and Storage Distributed Resources Scheduler) activity to overall data center management.

The SRM Suite is a single, easily consumable monitoring and reporting package that provides performance, capacity, and configuration management for EMC and select third-party storage arrays. EMC Prosphere is a key component of the SRM Suite. Through Smarts 9.1 integration with the SRM Suite, ProSphere now provides EMC Smarts 9.1 with storage topology – and device-level information to enhance the Smarts management model.

The new enhancements to Smarts enable high service-level assurance and operational efficiency by eliminating management blind spots. It delivers detailed insight into virtualized IT environments, from VMs to the underlying physical infrastructure. It gives customers the ability to understand the changing relationships and interdependencies among physical and virtual infrastructure elements. These elements include physical, virtual, and wireless networks, virtual switches, VMware vSphere Storage and VM vSphere vMotion activity, VM impacts, and device and path information for all vSphere attached storage.

Smarts 9.1 Technology Highlights:

• Increased Virtual Data Center Visibility – Delivers line-of-sight of virtualized IT environments, from VMs to the underlying physical infrastructure, so that users can understand the interdependencies-including virtual networks, virtual switches, vSphere vMotion activity, VM impacts, and all vSphere attached storage.
• Configuration Management – Delivers ability to see all changes and deviations from approved configurations, leverage policies to ensure desired configurations automatically remain compliant, make device updates and corrections faster and easily, and eliminate the possibility of human error creating a service-impacting problem.
• Enhanced Ability to Identify & Act – Delivers the ability to automatically identify root causes, and quickly separate symptoms from problems so users can address the appropriate issue impacting application and service delivery. Users can also determine risk conditions by seeing performance degradations and understanding dependencies-before business impact occurs. In addition, customers can manage key cloud-enabling technologies, including protocol management, MPLS, optical, multicast, and VoIP.

Announced earlier this year, VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 is an integrated cloud infrastructure solution that integrates VMware’s virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio – simplifying the adoption of cloud era technologies for customers. With this latest version of Smarts, EMC is extending a holistic view across all IT infrastructure elements to improve availability and performance of applications and services. Smarts delivers a complete, unified view into the virtual data center, enabling customers to effectively visualize and understand the complex interrelationships among virtual assets, their underpinning physical elements and the applications and data sources that relate to them. While VMware is managing the virtual infrastructure, Smarts is managing the supporting ‘shared’ physical and virtual infrastructure to provide a complete view of the physical and virtual environments.

Nadine Routhier, VP, NCR Telecommunications and Technology, said: "NCR is using EMC Smarts in its Managed IT Domain Services, providing our customers with remote monitoring and management of enterprise IT domains. Network operations is critical to this service, which monitors, identifies, and resolves problems in the IT infrastructure. With Smarts now providing management of both the physical and virtual environments-including remote restoration and updates to managed wireless devices, NCR can quickly identify the root cause of issues, and confidently provide service assurance to customers."

Jim Frey, managing research director Network Management, Enterprise Management Associates, said: "EMC Smarts has been addressing the availability, performance, configuration, and service assurance needs of enterprises and service providers across virtual and physical technologies for years. EMC is extending those capabilities with the latest release of EMC Smarts to provide enhanced, integrated visibility into storage and wireless networking. These extensions improve the solution’s completeness and put operators in position to better understand, monitor, and troubleshoot cross-domain issues across the whole IT service delivery environment."

Amitabh Srivastava, president, EMC Advanced Storage Division, said: "As customers continue transforming their virtual data centers and cloud architectures-laying the foundation for a Software Defined Data Center-it creates new management challenges. The need for agility, efficiency and controlling costs remain top of mind. This is an important update to EMC Smarts because it provides new levels of visibility into their virtual data centers, along with actionable information that enable customers to address issues before their business is impacted."