New EMC Ionix family ushers in next generation of it management

Ionix software combines automated server compliance and configuration solutions gained from EMC's recent Configuresoft acquisition with EMC's market-leading and newly unified management software portfolio to provide unparalleled insight and control across physical and virtual IT infrastructures.

Over the past five years, EMC has assembled through acquisition and organic growth an extensive portfolio of technologies that provide IT management across the data center - including Smarts, nLayers, Voyence, Infra, ControlCenter and Configuresoft.

Ionix represents a culmination of this strategy, bringing together these products under one unified family that offers customers management capabilities across their physical and virtual IT infrastructures - including servers, networks, storage, and applications.

"At every major disruption point, huge new market opportunities are created and the eventual winners tend to be the ones that are purpose-built for the new world order - not those who bolt-on functions to last year's model," said Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

"While there are current leaders in this space, they built monolithic software to support monolithic physical infrastructures that weren't designed to be modular. Additionally, they were built well before anyone ever heard of virtualization, let alone the cloud. It's obvious to me that EMC has the pieces - including the services - to disrupt the current IT management market in the same way they have done with in the past, whether it be EMC Symmetrix, EMC CLARiiON, or VMware's infrastructure virtualization solutions."

"Today's announcement comes at a critical time for customers who are moving aggressively to virtualize their data centers,"

said EMC's Mohammed Amin, Regional Manager - Middle East, North West Africa and Turkey.

"While virtualization holds the promise of increased efficiencies and reduced costs, its dynamic nature forces companies to think differently about management - as companies seek new ways to automate, manage, and gain control and compliance of the virtualized data center. Customers are quickly realizing that legacy IT management tools simply cannot keep pace."

The most demanding virtualization management challenges can be answered through innovative integrations across what have been traditionally siloed IT management solutions. Ionix software and solutions break through these silos with new levels of integration and automation that can accelerate the virtualization management journey by exploiting the openness and unique automation capabilities of each solution.

Ionix solutions span four categories -- each with unique benefits for the virtualized data center:

- EMC Ionix for Service Discovery and Mapping: Provides the visibility into complex applications and their physical and virtual dependencies - supporting and enabling Configuration Management Database (CMDB)/Configuration Management System (CMS) population, change management, and application troubleshooting, and helping customers meet the challenges of business continuity and site recovery across the physical and virtual infrastructure. The solution also enables customers to accurately map servers and applications prior to data center moves, consolidations, and virtualization migrations.

- EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence: Provides automated root-cause and impact analysis and monitors services across both physical and virtual environments. The solution also enables customers to visualize the relationships between Virtual Machines (VMs), VMware ESX Servers they reside on and the network. Customers can integrate automated root cause analytics into their service desk to open trouble tickets based on pinpointed problems found through the EMC Ionix patented codebook correlation technology for enhanced incident and problem management.

- EMC Ionix for Data Center Automation and Compliance: Enables customers to scale their virtualized data center without increasing staff. Through strong compliance management solutions across the IT infrastructure - including servers, storage, application dependencies and networks - customers can assess configuration compliance against regulatory, best-practices, and internal governance policies including VMware vSphere 4 deployment guidelines. Customers can then remediate compliance violations across physical and virtual infrastructures.

Through additional integrations with EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, customers can view change events from the operations topology map and enable incident and problem processes to leverage change and configuration processes.

- EMC Ionix for Service Management: Enables customers to rapidly deploy scalable and cost-effective IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management. This solution highlights two key integrations across the portfolio - integration with CMDBs and workflow automation. Customers can build a federated CMDB that is auto-populated with physical and virtual CIs and dependencies.

"End-to-end management of heterogeneous datacenter environments is an important consideration for customers as they accelerate their drive to operational efficiencies through expanded VMware virtualization," said Shekar Avyar, vice president, infrastructure alliances, VMware. "Complementing the strengths of VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter management, the EMC Ionix family of solutions provides comprehensive management across physical and virtualized resources, enabling customers to focus less on the plumbing in the datacenter and more on delivering IT as an efficient, flexible and reliable service."

In conjunction with the unified software portfolio, EMC also announced its Resource Management Software Group (RMSG) is also being renamed EMC Ionix, effective immediately. The entire family of Ionix solutions and services is available now.