EMC Takes On Info Management

The Hopkinton, Mass.-based vendor is using network management technology from its recent acquisition of Smarts to automate storage management with the introduction of two new applications.

The first application, EMC Smarts Storage Insight for Availability, works with EMC’s ControlCenter family of storage resource management and device management software to automatically discover and map Fibre Channel SAN elements and how they interact with applications, said Chris Gahagan, EMC Software Group’s senior vice president of resource management.

Also new is the EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager. This resource management software creates a realtime, interactive model of the application environment to help administrators know how an application is running, Gahagan said.

EMC also unveiled two new offerings aimed at helping secure customer data. EMC Assessment Service for Storage Security brings EMC into a customer’s data storage environment to audit and report on the security, said Dennis Hoffman, vice president of information security at EMC.

The second, EMC Documentum Digital Rights Management, embeds control rights into data to block unauthorized access and maintains a continuous audit of accessed data, Hoffman said.

EMC also has a new program to integrate security policy technology across its entire line of storage products, Hoffman said.

Solution providers said EMC is taking steps in the right direction. Dan Carson, vice president of marketing and business development at EMC partner Open Systems Solutions, Willow Grove, Pa., said that reporting tools are a great first step, but for true effectiveness, EMC will have to tie them to management technologies.

Available now, Storage Insight for Availability is priced about $750 to $1,000 per Tbyte of capacity, and Application Discovery Manager is priced on a per-node basis, with 2,000 nodes costing about $220,000.