Business analytics and information firm EMC and virtualization specialist VMware deepened their partnership, working together to integrate EMCs VNX storage intelligence with the analytics of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. The sales and development agreement between the two companies will combine EMCs storage intelligence with the analytics and infrastructure visualization of VMware vCenter Operations. The VNX Storage Analytics Suite and VNX Connector for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite will be available in the second half of 2012, an EMC release said.
The VNX Storage Analytics Suite offers capabilities such as storage performance and capacity optimization and service-level agreement (SLA) improvement through analytics and diagnostics, while the VNX Connector provides VNX storage metrics and configurable dashboards within the VMware Operations Management Suite. Integration between the VNX Connector for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite allows VNX storage metrics and VMware vCenter Operations capabilities to function together, offering configurable dashboards with drill-down capabilities, health alerts and analytics.
“The combination of EMC storage intelligence and vCenter Operations Management Suite will offer automated optimization and simplicity for our joint customers. Together, these solutions can help drive increased storage performance and infrastructure management in highly dynamic virtual and cloud environments, as well as physical data centers, while delivering operational cost benefits, Ramin Sayar, vice president and general manager of cloud and virtualization management products for VMware, said in a press statement. With this integrated cross-domain solution, organizations of all sizes can proactively manage their overall infrastructure system health, as they continue to automate and transform their IT infrastructure.”
The VNX unified storage family already offers VMware and Hyper-V integration and support for hundreds of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes. The Storage Analytics Suite will support block and file storage as well as display EMC Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST ) Cache configuration and performance, and FAST VP (FAST for Virtual Pools) tiers and policies. Users can also take advantage of flash-optimized performance from an all flash array to using flash drives for extendable cache and in the virtual storage pool.
“The benefits of total transparency into storage systems, in both physical and virtualized infrastructures, are staggering. VNX Storage Analytics Suite is designed to capitalize on this transparency by offering simplified storage management, optimized performance and easily maintained service levels for unprecedented efficiency, EMCs unified storage division president Rich Napolitano said in a prepared statement. This holistic view of assets, combined with storage metrics, including FAST Cache and FAST VP, will optimize both efficiency and performancecritical elements of any IT strategy.”
