EMC's Online SAN Plan

The applications are part of EMC's ControlCenter family of open storage management products and are aimed at delivering, enabling or accessing EMC's expertise over the Web, said Pat Cassidy, director of open software marketing at EMC, based here.

"ControlCenter online provides clients with all the information they need to move, change, monitor, discover and repurpose their storage. %85 We are bridging the gap between customers' specific challenges and EMC's best practices," Cassidy said.

The first application, SAN Architect, allows customers to input specifics about their SAN environment and then make and modify any changes, he said. As changes are made, the application accesses EMC databases containing information gleaned from more than 500,000 Fibre Channel SAN port installations and from EMC's interoperability labs to see the effect of the changes before they are made, he added.

The second application, AutoAdvice, sits on a low-cost PC behind the customer's firewall to gather system metrics, but not data, related to the operation of Oracle, SAP, Exchange and SQL systems every five minutes, Cassidy said. That data is sent to EMC every 15 minutes, where it is aggregated through a rules-based engine to check SAN performance. The aggregated data with suggestions on ways to improve performance is sent daily to the client, he said.

The new automation software is a great complement to EMC's full line of enterprise, midrange and archival storage, said Pat Sherman, co-owner and vice president of sales at eServ, a Peoria, Ill.-based solution provider and EMC partner.

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"It lets us go back to the customer and help with trending," said Sherman. "Customers typically don't look at their infrastructure unless they get error messages. This could help us work with customers on the threshold."