EMC Announces New End-to-End Storage Provisioning Solution

EMC today announced Automated Resource Manager, a new open software product designed to greatly reduce the complexity and cost of provisioning storage resources.

According to EMC, the Automated Resource Manager greatly simplifies end-to-end storage provisioning by automating the associated manual steps, reducing user errors and ensuring that each application receives the storage it needs based on business requirements.

A key member of the EMC ControlCenter family of storage management software, Automated Resource Manager enables organizations to quickly and easily define and apply storage service-levels for specific application requirements. Automated Resource Manager supports both EMC and non-EMC storage devices including EMC Symmetrix, EMC CLARiiON, and Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks. Additional third-party support is in development.

Erez Ofer, EMC Executive Vice President of Open Software, said, “Before Automated Resource Manager, a simple request for more storage could take days to fulfill. Now, that same procedure can be completed in minutes – by a single person. Automated Resource Manager accelerates IT’s ability to respond to business needs, freeing highly-trained IT staff for more important problems than servicing the latest capacity request.”

According to Nick Allen, Vice President and Research Director with Gartner, “Providing storage to an application is one of the most important functions at the heart of Storage Area Management. However, provisioning requires punching down through a surprising number of layers between the application and the actual bytes on a disk drive – a laborious and user-intensive endeavor. As storage networks and storage capacity usage continue to grow, technologies that automate provisioning will become absolutely critical to managing this growth, and will really resonate with users.”

Automated Resource Manager enables customers to provision storage through user-set policies to support specific business needs. Policy options can be set for type of storage, RAID level, replication parameters, or number of paths between server and storage. For example, customers can assign demanding applications such as On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) the highest levels of storage performance and availability, and assign other service levels to less-critical applications.

Automated Resource Manager will be available within 60 days.