EMC intros new cloud storage management

IT service provider EMC has introduced a new approach to management of storage environments that is designed to simplify increasingly complex cloud-based architectures in large enterprise environments.

The company’s ProSphere storage resource management offering is aimed at large enterprises and can also scale to address the needs of data centers and globally distributed enterprises, said Kevin Gray, manager of IMG storage resource management marketing for EMC. The platform addresses management of increasingly larger, more disparate environments while integrating virtualization and hybrid cloud computing models, he said.

“We recommend that large enterprises proactively consider the new management challenges posed by virtualization and cloud computing as they migrate towards these next-generation computing platforms,” Gray said. “Sometimes customers begin the migration process, then reach a point where traditional storage management solutions are becoming too time consuming. Storage management needs to map appropriately to the infrastructure—so the decision making process should include a discussion on storage management requirements.”

ProSphere provides full integration and support for the latest EMC and VMware technologies, the company said, and EMC ControlCenter users under maintenance contract can upgrade to ProSphere free of charge. Features of the platform include agentless discovery, two-click end-to-end views and EMC’s “Smart Groups” policy management that lets users group and manage objects with similar characteristics.

EMC is confident that enterprises and cloud service providers grasp the importance of management in their deployments of increasingly complex and distributed environments, Gray said.

“Forward-thinking customers will see the need for new management tools that are specifically geared to support of cloud environments,” he said. “Enterprises move to the cloud for its cost savings, flexibility and efficiencies. Effective management is part and parcel to realizing these benefits. Customers considering cloud deployments, by nature, will ask themselves ‘how do we manage this?’” 

ProSphere is sold directly to enterprises through reseller, or directly from EMC, Gray said. Deployed as a virtual appliance, ProSphere takes less than an hour to install and discovers most enterprise environments in under eight hours, according to EMC. The company also claims that ProSphere reduces the number of physical servers to run the application by up to 75 percent, compared to its predecessor.