EMC unveils Ionix Data Center Insight laying foundation for unified IT configuration visibility across data centre

With an ability to bring together dependency mapping and discovery across storage, network, server and application domains, Ionix Data Centre Insight is a game-changing solution that enables customers to evolve their Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) into fully federated Configuration Management Systems (CMS).

Ionix Data Centre Insight is a key piece of EMC's newly announced Ionix IT management suite - powerful solutions for automating IT management across a unified infrastructure of storage, server, network and virtualization resources. With Ionix, customers can confidently move from physical to virtual to cloud computing - maximizing the value of their new enterprise IT architecture.

"Establishing and populating a federated CMDB system is one of the biggest challenges companies face today when trying to manage their next-generation data centres. With so many tools collecting data from all parts of the IT environment, the ability to get up-to-date, accurate and complete data to a single, monolithic CMDB solution becomes extremely difficult and requires excessive manual labor and guesswork," said Dennis Drogseth, Vice President, Enterprise Management Associates.

"With EMC Ionix Data Centre Insight, EMC is taking a major step forward in helping customers tackle these challenges head-on, while at the same time enabling far more flexibility in capturing real-time insights versus aging information," added Drogseth.

With Ionix Data Centre Insight, customers can quickly and easily:

• Automatically populate both EMC and third-party CMDBs with best-practices configuration items (CIs) and allows customization to define customer-specific CIs.
• Build a single, reconciled view of the truth about the IT environment.
• Visualize application and service dependencies across the data centre - including applications, servers, networks, storage - both physical and virtual.
• Leverage the solution as a critical component of a federated and modular CMS to achieve a single, accurate and current view of the IT environment, so those responsible for configuration management can understand - across multiple domains - the resources underpinning business services.

Mohammed Amin, Regional Manager - Turkey, Middle East & North West Africa, EMC, said:

"Virtualization requires customers to break down silos and manage across domains - that's the breakthrough that EMC Ionix Data Centre Insight brings. Today's data center operations teams are faced with the hurdle of unifying their IT infrastructure across multiple domains to better populate CMDBs, more effectively manage changes and accurately troubleshoot across the data center."

Continued Amin, "Current tools fail to address these challenges as most are focused on single domain mapping. To effectively manage the unified infrastructure of next-generation data centres, customers need a way to track cross-domain dependencies and dynamically link them together. EMC Ionix Data Centre Insight is a significant new solution for the virtualized data center -- unifying and linking interdependencies end-to-end - from storage to server to network to applications. The end result enables customers to accelerate their journey to the private cloud."

Architected to support heterogeneous, third party data sources, Ionix Data Centre Insight initially supports discovery from a wide variety of EMC Ionix data sources. Ionix Data Centre Insight automates the integration of these discovery sources and populates best-practices-based configuration information into the leading CMDBs such as EMC Ionix Service Manager CMDB. Additionally, Data Centre Insight provides a web services visualization layer that enables cross-domain dependency mapping with search functions - spanning applications, servers, networks and storage - physical and virtual.