EMC's two latest subscription software services are based on its flagship ControlCenter storage management software and will be served up via a web portal to help administrators and managers design storage-area networks.
The first product is SAN Architect, a network modeling technology that guides architects and administrators through the design and validation of a San, providing a final blueprint or suggestions for upgrades based on user input.
"The output is a complete end-to-end topology of your new SAN with proposed changes," said Pat Cassidy, director of marketing for EMC's Open Software division.
EMC also introduced AutoAdvice, a web-based tool that provides customised analysis of performance and resource utilisation across applications, servers, databases and storage systems.
AutoAdvice comes as a one-year subscription that will cover from one to 50,000 CPUs, and starts at $400 for a single CPU. SAN Architect is also available as a one-year subscription, with an entry-level list price of $2,400. Both are available now.
AutoAdvice works by collecting information every five minutes about a company network via a TCP/IP-based portal and collating that information in a database. A rules-based engine then measures best practices against that environment.
The analysis takes a day, and results are returned to users in an HTML-enabled e-mail. The results show where existing or potential problems are likely to come from and provides a graphical user interface showing the severity of warnings as giving details of more specific details such as CPU utilisation or I/O throughput.
The analysis also contains HTML links to supplier sites for items such as host bus adapters and switches.
Cassidy said the results of SAN Architect can be viewed either on a Visio presentation or an Excel spreadsheet and can be kept online for easy access or printed out. EMC added that it would support the final design completely.
