EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, announced EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager 7.0 and EMC Smarts Service Assurance Manager 7.0 software ? bringing heightened levels of security and cross-domain support for managing a broader scope of IT and service provider environments. By enhancing support for highly secure and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) ? based environments – and adding compatibility for a broader range of application and system instrumentation such as HP’s Mercury SiteScope ? EMC continues to widen its model-based management line-of-sight.
Smarts IP Availability Manager automates real-time root-cause analysis of critical network connectivity layers, including network-attached storage connectivity. The solution’s extensive impact analysis distills thousands of simultaneous events into a few root-cause problems. Smarts Service Assurance Manager is the cornerstone of the EMC Smarts management suite, integrating and correlating topology, events and analysis from multiple sources ? offering a real-time end-to-end perspective on the IT environment, its health and its effect on core business services.
Core to these new offerings are newly enhanced levels of security. Version 7.0 now offers SNMPv3 authentication support for traps, which is a key requirement for government agencies and managed service providers. This new support gives users two layers of security, providing full encryption of packets as well as full encryption and authentication for polling and discovery. Also key to Smarts IP Availability Manager 7.0 and EMC Smarts Service Assurance Manager 7.0 is “IP Tagging.” With IP Tagging, users can better handle overlapping IP addresses in both IP and MPLS environments. Smarts can now tag and monitor multiple links with the same address, allowing Smarts to deal with duplicate addresses across disparate domains.
“The EMC Smarts architecture allows us to integrate all of our siloed management systems, including in-house-developed systems, into one correlation console,” said John Premus, Chief Technology Officer, JRI America, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. “Of all the solutions tested, we found that only EMC Smarts software provides the levels of business logic necessary, without forcing us to write complex rules to capture every possible scenario.”
One of the key success drivers of the EMC Smarts suite has always been its ability to automatically manage highly distributed, complex IT environments spanning a variety of domains,” said Chris Gahagan, EMC’s Senior Vice President, Resource Management Software. “Today’s announcement takes this capability even further – better enabling customers to bridge management gaps to enhance reliability of their core business services, which are built on top of these complex IT infrastructures.”
Further upgrades include enriched support for key management environments like MPLS, and wider integration with system and application instrumentation solutions.
* MPLS Service Triage: The Smarts suite now offers support for isolating MPLS service outages down to the Label Switched Path (LSP) connection within the MPLS cloud. LSPs are used to transport user data across the MPLS network. By testing the specific data paths, Smarts dramatically reduces the time to identify the root cause of customer-affecting service degradations, enabling service providers to better deliver on service level agreements.
As MPLS performance problems occur for various reasons – including transport, label distribution, routing and configuration issues – LSP ping capability targets end-to-end connectivity. Working with other Smarts service probes, such as Virtual Routing and Forwarding ping, the capability enables first-line operations to quickly focus resources on the proper problem.
* Application and System Instrumentation Integration with Mercury Sitescope: Creates a gateway between Smarts software and Mercury SiteScope to collect alerts and daily logs for any of more than 65 system, application, web/URL and network service monitors that SiteScope oversees. SiteScope can generate alerts on various types of threshold violations for any availability and performance metric monitored, which can then be collected and processed by Smarts software for cross-domain visibility, topology and presentation. Users can thus leverage the model-based capabilities of Smarts software without abandoning their investments in existing tools such as SiteScope.
Both Smarts Availability Manager and Service Assurance Manager software are built on EMC’s unique architecture, which leverages three core disciplines to deliver a more intelligent, automated management solution:
* Abstraction: Understands complex environments by focusing on common properties of components rather than getting lost in specific product details. Smarts enables abstraction through the EMC Smarts Common Information Model*, which automatically models both physical and logical components, their relationships, behaviours and interactions across infrastructure, applications and business services.
* Analysis: Pinpoints root-cause problems wherever they occur and calculates their impact on the business. Smarts software enables comprehensive analysis with its patented Codebook Correlation Technology* to automate the analysis of any type of problem in any technology. Codebook automatically calculates the sets of symptoms, called signatures, that indicate all authentic problems in the managed environment, and it automatically adapts signatures as the infrastructure changes.
* Automation: Automates high-cost, labor-intensive tasks so organizations can improve service levels, increase revenue, cut operating costs and reduce business risk. Smarts automates the hardest tasks in IT management, including discovery, modeling, analysis, workflow and update.
