EMC Adds Managed Services

EMC added to its growing services portfolio today with a new offering to
help customers manage their data with help from EMC experts.

The EMC managed services portfolio is designed to help customers improve
their information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy for stowing data from
its creation until its destruction. ILM is popular among vendors hawking
products to help corporations mind compliance regulations for record
retention.

EMC has been touting ILM as a must-have strategy for a few years, and it has
served the company well, with increased hardware,
software and services sales in 2005 overall.

EMC’s services business also grew over 20 percent in 2005, as the company
is trying to keep pace with rivals IBM, HP and Hitachi Data Systems in the
market for storing data and retrieving it quickly.

The managed services portfolio, designed for short- or long-term projects,
includes EMC Residency Services, in which EMC’s service personnel assists
companies on site with day-to-day storage operations.

These service workers could engage in resource management storage
provisioning; storage monitoring; weekly status reporting; configuration;
and capacity and storage reporting, among other tasks.

EMC’s Managed Utility Service combines on-site services with the ability for
customers to pay as they need to scale larger.

In this service, EMC manages the storage environment and pre-positions
storage capacity in a customer’s data center as a sort of “electric utility
model,” allowing customers to pay for storage assets as they need them,
rather than purchasing a bunch of gear they might not use.

Billing is based on the number of EMC professionals deployed and the storage
consumption reported by an EMC tracking tool.

Lastly, EMC Storage Management Services deploy services workers to
a customer site to provide comprehensive storage management support that
meets agreed-upon service metrics.

This service is tailored for engagements of more than 100 terabytes of
storage capacity over a period of at least three years.

In a sign of validation for these on-site managed services, American Express
has signed a multi-year services agreement with EMC to manage its storage
environment, which includes applications and thousands of servers.

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Article originally appeared on Internetnews.com.