EMC Enhances Virtual Data Centre Control Platform

EMC continues its transformation from storage giant to cloud infrastructure provider, after it launched an updated data centre control package that enables better overall use of VMware’s popular vCenter server.

EMC made the announcement at VMware’s global partner conference, which is being held at the Venetian Hotel through 16 February.

Admin Tool

EMC, the parent company of VMware, said the new IT Operations Intelligence v9.0 offers a unified, graphical-user-interface view into an entire virtual data centre infrastructure as controlled by vCenter.

This means that data centre administrators now can better visualise and understand the interrelationships among virtual assets, their underpinning physical elements, the I/O sources flows, and the applications and data sources that relate to them.

Most conventional tools for IT environments are limited in their ability to visualise these virtual machine connections. This can create so-called “blind spots” that force IT operations teams to manually aggregate bits and pieces of data from multiple sources in an attempt to identify, understand and resolve issues in a virtualised data centre – especially large facilities with hundreds or thousands of server racks.

Key new features in the upgrade, according to EMC, include the following:

• detailed operational management insight into VMware environments, including cross-domain availability and impact analysis for all VMware-attached storage, and full impact analysis to the virtual machine level;
• visibility into the connectivity and relationships among simple and distributed virtual switches and networks from VMware and Cisco Systems, as well as the ability to understand how problems in virtual switches and virtual networks impact virtual machines and virtualised applications;
• enhanced management display visualisations that provide cross-domain notification detail and dashboard-like visibility using a new browser-based console with mash-up capabilities;
• enhanced availability management for virtualised applications, including composite applications; and
• a framework for managing Metro Ethernet-based service availability and discovering Metro Ethernet topologies.