Recognizing that mid-tier enterprise storage requirements are continually rising, EMC Corp. unveiled several new offerings Monday designed to simplify storage management and deployment without scrimping on functionality.
At the Gartner VARVision Conference in Hollywood, EMC released new CLARiiON software, enabled by the latest version of CLARiiON’s FLARE operating environment.
Among the new software is SnapView Roll Back – a point-in-time copy software, which now offers instant restore functionality for SnapView snapshots. In addition, the new functionality lets customers instantly restore both SnapView Business Continuity Volumes (BCVs) as well as SnapView snapshots, the company said.
Also new is the SnapView Integration Module for Microsoft Corp.’s Exchange (SIME). According to Ken Steinhardt, director of technology analysis with EMC in Hopkinton, Mass., SIME allows administrators to automate back-up and restore processes without taking Exchange offline.
“Historically, this would take days to do,” Steinhardt explained. “But with SIME, you can restore (Exchange) in literally minutes.”
The company plans to extend this functionality to Microsoft’s SQL Server in Q4 2003.
EMC has also introduced SAN Copy Open Storage Support, which enables automation of bulk data transfers without consuming resources. The new software also supports bi-directional data mobility between EMC and Hewlett-Packard Co. StorageWorks arrays.
“(Mid-tier companies) want functionality that will make them very productive,” Steinhardt said. “Typically features in the mid-tier market have not been as easy to use or easy to deploy. The beauty of these announcement is that really, we are giving customers in that space the tools that give them high-end functionality in a mid-tier offering.”
In addition to the CLARiiON-specific software, EMC announced two extensions to its Visual family of storage management offerings. The VisualSRM (storage resource management) lets users track how storage is being used and by whom. With VisualSRM, administrators can set policies for moving, deleting, compressing and archiving information based on such rules as age of information, time since information was last accessed as well as pre-defined capacity limits. The software is storage agnostic and integrates with storage management applications from vendors including HP, IBM Corp. and Computer Associates Inc.
EMC VisualSAN (storage area network) gives IT administrators a single view of all devices across their storage networks, allowing for simpler performance analysis and configuration of these devices. Currently, VisualSAN only supports CLARiiON networked storage systems, but EMC said support will be extended to other mid-tier storage platforms soon.
“Analysts have highlighted that the mid-tier market is rapidly expanding and is where a lot of the growth in the storage market will continue to come from,” Steinhardt said. “We’re just trying to make life simple for them.”
All offerings are available now. For more information, visit www.emc.com.
