In a move designed to add more teeth to its IP storage system portfolio, EMC on March 6 debuted two new versions of its midtier Celerra product line.
At the same time, via its Smarts business unit, the storage company launched what officials claim is the first management product to provide root-cause analysis for NAS (network-attached storage).
Going one step further, EMC extended the Smarts IP Availability Manager to NAS devices, beginning with EMC Celerra systems and Network Appliance filers.
The offering represents the first extension of the patented Smarts Codebook Correlation Technology and CIM (Common Information Model) into the NAS environment.
“We felt the NAS space was a logical place to start extending the technology to storage,” said an official at EMC, in Hopkinton, Mass.
The root-cause-analysis capability allows users to diagnose whether the EMC Celerra and NetApp filer is up or down. It helps speed problem resolution by cutting through the hundreds of SNMP alerts that are generated when an outage occurs.
Whether EMC will add support for other NAS devices has not been decided, according to the official. “We are investigating whether to extend it to other products. We think we have covered the majority of products,” he said.
The software can diagnose whether the Data Mover is up or down.
When a root-cause problem such as a router failure occurs, it generates hundreds of events. This typically forces a NOC (network operations center) administrator to spend a great deal of time researching the alerts to figure out what the root-cause problem may be. Through EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager for NAS, that effort instead can be shifted toward focusing on what precisely causes a router to fail and how best to fix it.
The new extension is available now and is free for customers already using the EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager.
On the hardware front, EMCs new Celerra NS350 and Celerra NS704 boxes can scale up to 10TB and 48TB, respectively, and are built to take advantage of maturing NAS and iSCSI connectivity environments.
The newest additions to EMCs Celerra family feature iSCSI replication and virtual provisioning tools. The lower-end Celerra NS350 box supports both Fibre Channel and ATA drives, as well as online upgrades from a single to a dual Data Mover configuration.
EMC expands IP storage
Offerings include new versions of the midtier Celerra line and a management product for NAS root-cause analysis.
* EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager for NAS automates root-cause analysis of IP network availability issues
* EMC Celerra NS350 scales up to 10TB; online upgrades from single to dual Data Mover configurations
* EMC Celerra NS704 scales up to 48TB; provides an estimated 70,000 NFS (Network File System) operations per second
Source: eWEEK reporting and EMC