EMC Brings Storage Software To The Midrange

"We're well-known in the high end for software," said Jeff Bernard, director of Clariion software product marketing at EMC, Hopkinton, Mass. "It's time to let people know more about our midtier offerings."

It's not wise for EMC to try to modify enterprise-class software and force-feed it to the midrange space, Bernard said. Therefore, the company has developed products aimed specifically at customers in the $100 million to $1 billion revenue range, he said.

To that end, EMC this week unveiled two new software packages and enhancements to existing software offerings.

The first new product, VisualSRM, is a storage resource management product developed by Astrum, which EMC acquired in April.

VisualSRM provides active storage resource management, Bernard said. Instead of generating reports and leaving it up to systems administrators to take actions based on the reports, VisualSRM allows VARs to create policies based on rules, thereby automating the management, he said. This software is the same software currently OEMed by Overland Storage, he said.

EMC's second new product, VisualSAN, includes features that handle discovery of storage devices and active configuration and management of those devices. Like VisualSRM, VisualSAN is the result of an acquisition, in this case that of Prisa Networks, which EMC bought a year ago.

The vendor also introduced enhancements to the EMC Navisphere, EMC SnapView and EMC SAN Copy applications for its Clariion storage arrays.

The updated Navisphere now allows LUN expansion on-the-fly, which quickly provides expanded storage capacity as needed, Bernard said. Customers can add new drives and then restripe the data across the new drives for increased capacity and performance. They can also combine data protected by different RAID levels without striping. Both of these tasks can be done without disrupting operations, he said.

SnapView now allows instant restoration of SnapView snapshots, so users can instantly restore a specific data snapshot to their production volume, Bernard said. This also allows recovery to a particular point in time without going to the backup tape, he said.

EMC's new SnapView Integration Module for Exchange is aimed at removing the complexity of replicating and recovering Microsoft Exchange data at specific points in time, Bernard said.

Finally, EMC SAN Copy, which migrates data for backups, reporting and analysis between a central office and remote office, was updated to work with non-Clariion arrays, Bernard said. Specifically, SAN Copy now integrates with Hewlett-Packard HSG80-based arrays such as the MA8000, EMA12000 and EMA16000. By year end, the application will support HP's EVA arrays, IBM's FAStT200, Sun's StorEdge T3 and Hitachi Data Systems' Lightning 9960.