EMC Boosts Security Level of Network Analysis Software

EMC officials Dec. 13 unveiled EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager 7.0 and EMC Smarts Service Assurance Manager 7.0 software—products the company says bring heightened levels of security and cross-domain support for managing IT and service provider environments.

Smarts IP Availability Manager automates real-time root-cause analysis of critical network connectivity layers, including network-attached storage connectivity. Its impact analysis is designed to distill thousands of simultaneous events into a few root-cause problems, EMC officials said, while Smarts Service Assurance Manager integrates and correlates topology, events and analysis from multiple sources.

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Key to these new offerings are newly enhanced levels of security, EMC officials said. Version 7.0 now offers SNMPv3 authentication support for traps, 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. In addition, Smarts IP Availability Manager 7.0 and EMC Smarts Service Assurance Manager 7.0 feature "IP Tagging." With IP Tagging, users can better handle overlapping IP addresses in both IP and MPLS environments, company officials said.

"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 in a statement. JRI America is a 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," Premus said.

"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, EMCs senior vice president of Resource Management Software, in the same statement. "Todays 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.

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