
HOPKINTON, Mass., Dec. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager 7.0 and EMC Smarts Service Assurance Manager 7.0 software -- bringing heightened levels of security and cross-domain support for managing a broader scope of IT and service provider environments. By enhancing support for highly secure and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)- based environments -- and adding compatibility for a broader range of application and system instrumentation such as HP's Mercury SiteScope -- EMC continues to widen its model-based management line-of-sight.
Smarts IP Availability Manager automates real-time root-cause analysis of critical network connectivity layers, including network-attached storage connectivity. The solution's extensive impact analysis distils thousands of simultaneous events into a few root-cause problems. Smarts Service Assurance Manager is the cornerstone of the EMC Smarts management suite, integrating and correlating topology, events and analysis from multiple sources -- offering a real-time end-to-end perspective on the IT environment, its health and its effect on core business services.
Core to these new offerings are newly enhanced levels of security. Version 7.0 now offers SNMPv3 authentication support for traps, which is a key requirement for government agencies and managed service providers. This new support gives users two layers of security, providing full encryption of packets as well as full encryption and authentication for polling and discovery. Also key to Smarts IP Availability Manager 7.0 and EMC Smarts Service Assurance Manager 7.0 is "IP Tagging." With IP Tagging, users can better handle overlapping IP addresses in both IP and MPLS environments. Smarts can now tag and monitor multiple links with the same address, allowing Smarts to deal with duplicate addresses across disparate domains.
"The EMC Smarts architecture allows us to integrate all of our siloed management systems, including in-house-developed systems, into one correlation console," said John Premus, Chief Technology Officer, JRI America, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. "Of all the solutions tested, we found that only EMC Smarts software provides the levels of business logic necessary, without forcing us to write complex rules to capture every possible scenario."
"One of the key success drivers of the EMC Smarts suite has always been its ability to automatically manage highly distributed, complex IT environments spanning a variety of domains," said Chris Gahagan, EMC's Senior Vice President, Resource Management Software. "Today's announcement takes this capability even further -- better enabling customers to bridge management gaps to enhance reliability of their core business services, which are built on top of these complex IT infrastructures."
Further upgrades include enriched support for key management environments like MPLS, and wider integration with system and application instrumentation solutions.
-- MPLS Service Triage: The Smarts suite now offers support for isolating
MPLS service outages down to the Label Switched Path (LSP) connection
within the MPLS cloud. LSPs are used to transport user data across the
MPLS network. By testing the specific data paths, Smarts dramatically
reduces the time to identify the root cause of customer-affecting
service degradations, enabling service providers to better deliver on
service level agreements.
As MPLS performance problems occur for various reasons -- including
transport, label distribution, routing and configuration issues -- LSP
ping capability targets end-to-end connectivity. Working with other
Smarts service probes, such as Virtual Routing and Forwarding ping, the
capability enables first-line operations to quickly focus resources on
the proper problem.
-- Application and System Instrumentation Integration with Mercury
SiteScope: Creates a gateway between Smarts software and Mercury
SiteScope to collect alerts and daily logs for any of more than 65
system, application, web/URL and network service monitors that
SiteScope oversees. SiteScope can generate alerts on various types of
threshold violations for any availability and performance metric
monitored, which can then be collected and processed by Smarts software
for cross-domain visibility, topology and presentation. Users can thus
leverage the model-based capabilities of Smarts software without
abandoning their investments in existing tools such as SiteScope.
Both Smarts Availability Manager and Service Assurance Manager software
are built on EMC's unique architecture, which leverages three core
disciplines to deliver a more intelligent, automated management
solution:
-- Abstraction: Understands complex environments by focusing on common
properties of components rather than getting lost in specific product
details. Smarts enables abstraction through the EMC Smarts Common
Information Model(TM), which automatically models both physical and
logical components, their relationships, behaviors and interactions
across infrastructure, applications and business services.
-- Analysis: Pinpoints root-cause problems wherever they occur and
calculates their impact on the business. Smarts software enables
comprehensive analysis with its patented Codebook Correlation
Technology(TM) to automate the analysis of any type of problem in any
technology. Codebook automatically calculates the sets of symptoms,
called signatures, that indicate all authentic problems in the managed
environment, and it automatically adapts signatures as the
infrastructure changes.
-- Automation: Automates high-cost, labor-intensive tasks so
organizations can improve service levels, increase revenue, cut
operating costs and reduce business risk. Smarts automates the hardest
tasks in IT management, including discovery, modeling, analysis,
workflow and update.
About EMC
EMC Corporation is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information management and storage that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at http://www.emc.com/.
EMC and Smarts are registered trademarks, and Common Information Model and Codebook Correlation Technology are trademarks, of EMC Corporation and its subsidiaries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
CONTACT: Craig Librett
508-293-7298