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EMC Corp. on Wednesday rolled out a host of new and enhanced software offerings, including new storage resource management software, a new Web-based performance tuning service and upgrades to six existing products.
The main new product, called Automated Resource Manager, or ARM, is provisioning software based on policies. It will be available in the next 60 days, officials said.
“We think this is a tremendous advancement,” CEO and President Joe Tucci said at the Storage Decision 2002 show in Chicago.
EMC also announced EMC Link, available now, which is a Web portal for users to share real-world product performance data with EMCs engineers. EMC will evaluate that data and send it back to users with optimization advice, said Erez Ofer, executive vice president. The Web site, www.emclink.net, has been in public testing for several months.
The upgraded products are SAN Manager, StorageScope, Common Array Manager, Replication Manager, Data Manager and ControlCenter. All will be available in 60 days, officials said.
SAN Manager, previously called Storage Network Manager 2.0, now makes use of Hewlett-Packard Co.s application programming interfaces—the only rival EMCs successfully traded with—to manage HPs StorageWorks arrays.
New in StorageScope is the ability to manage arrays from Hitachi Ltd., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc., EMC officials said. The details and extent of those abilities is not immediately clear. Common Array Manager, now in version 5.1, has support for Network Appliance Inc.s network-attached storage hardware. Network Appliance itself, of Sunnyvale, Calif., will soon announce connectivity from its own products into SANs (storage-area networks). Data Manager 5.0, using software from Solid Information Technology Ltd., of Mountain View, Calif., now centrally manages multiple backup instances in one interface.
Details of the new version of ControlCenter, 5.1, were not immediately available.
Replication Manager 2.0, available in December, now supports HP StorageWorks, EMCs own mid-range Clariion products, plus Microsoft Corp.s SQL Server 2000, Exchange, and IBMs DB2 database.
No updated product pricing was available.
Despite all of the new support, EMCs lack of API-sharing deals with anyone other than HP means that ARM and other products still can only launch the proprietary tools of such rivals as Hitachi and IBM—but cant actually control them with EMC tools—for functions like logical unit number masking, provisioning or replication. But EMC may still win in the long term because they have a single platform, ControlCenter, to plug it all into, said analyst James Poyner, of C.E. Unterberg, Towbin, in New York City.
“Its very much of a brass ring kind of function. This has got to just scare the living crap out of IBM and Hitachi,” he said.