At EMCs World 2012 conference, the company unveiled the DataBridge enterprise management software platform, which converges IT operations data from disparate silos of information, providing performance metrics to businesses with the aim of offering enhanced visibility and control over their physical and virtual IT infrastructure.
Enterprise customers use widgets to combine storage and network management information, reducing the time it takes to collect and analyze data. DataBridge will support the companys ProSphere, Data Protection Advisor, Unified Infrastructure Manager, IT Operations Intelligence Storage Configuration Advisor and AppSync platforms as well as non-EMC data sources. The widgets can be built using representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Java programmable interfaces, X M L, Microsoft SQL, SharePoint lists and Excel files, according to an EMC release.
“Businesses today are bombarded with so much information from many different sources. An average IT operations professional manages data across hundreds of networks, storage arrays, firewalls and applications, each with its own management tool and data source, Jay Mastaj, senior vice president and general manager of EMC’s infrastructure management group, said in a prepared statement. Manual processes are no longer viable in today’s world of instant business decisions. Our vision is to continue developing these types of solutions to help our customers move their crucial data and business operations to the cloud environments.”
Users can customize the DataBridge dashboard by dragging and dropping widgets, which can be combined with one or more data sources with business logic from the widget library, and can be modified at any time, according to changing business needs. EMC highlighted a slew of data storage metering widgets, such as Resource Analysis, which delivers utilization across both primary and backup storage gathered from the companys ProSphere and Data Protection Advisor platforms, as well as Storage Chargeback, which visualizes data usage.
“DataBridge delivers visibility across a business’ IT infrastructure in both the physical and virtual environmentsproviding customers with integrated dashboards, and analytics with better visibility across the organization, Jason Buffington, a senior analyst at IT research firm Enterprise Strategy Group, said in a prepared statement. These new capabilitiescombined with EMC’s storage and infrastructure solutions, and the ability to include third-party data sourcescreate valuable new opportunities for companies looking to exploit and leverage real-time data from their cloud environment.”