Storage vendor EMC is to add a new product to its ControlCenter
line of storage management software.
The company is also adding support for existing software products
to storage hardware from other vendors, the company has
announced.
The latest addition to the ControlCenter family is the Automated
Resource Manager software, which allows users to set predetermined
policies for how data should be managed in a storage area network
(SAN), said Don Swatik, vice-president of alliances and information
sciences at EMC.
"The software provides new levels of automation in the storage
management arena - not just automation but policy-based
automation," Swatik said. "The software takes the drudgery out of
storage management."
EMC has also updated existing products in its software arsenal to
include support for hardware from the Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Sun
Microsystems and Network Appliance.
Administrators have struggled to manage the flow of data across the
interlocking storage servers, switches and other networking
hardware that make up a SAN. The challenge of having myriad
applications run on hardware from a variety of vendors has
outweighed some of the benefits of SANs, such as the ability to
consolidate servers, over direct attached storage.
EMC last year unveiled its AutoIS strategy for helping
administrators deal with the complexity of SANs with a host of new
software management products.
EMC will start shipping Automated Resource Manager within the next
two months with support for its own Symmetrix and Clariion hardware
and HP's StorageWorks systems, Swatik said. The software allows
users to set policy options for things such as the type of storage
a user wants for certain applications, RAID (redundant array of
independent disks) levels, replication settings and the number of
paths between servers and storage systems.
Automated Resource Manager is designed to reduce the number of
steps it takes to free up more storage capacity for an application
and set a framework for a company's SAN policies.
"Just doing the simple act of adding storage capacity takes
multiple skillsets throughout an organisation," Swatik said.
To add capacity for a database, for example, administrators must be
familiar with the application itself and know about file systems
and storage networking. EMC's new software should automate many of
the steps in these management processes.
It also allows a company to set higher priorities for certain types
of applications. A company could, for example, set a policy that
says its CRM application must always have plenty of storage
capacity and that its storage needs should supersede the needs of
other applications. In addition, the software makes it possible to
set these types of policies by geography or business unit.
EMC has also launched its EMCLink product that sends out warnings
for potential performance problems and capacity shortages for
business applications in a SAN. The product works with databases
from Oracle and Microsoft.