LAS VEGAS and NEW YORK, Sept. 17 /PRNewswire/ — VMworld and Interop 2008 — EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today unveiled the results of an exclusive survey focused on IT management in virtualized environments. The analysis, conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), reveals that many companies today feel unprepared to face the challenges associated with managing IT environments that include both physical and virtual elements.

The survey, completed in September 2008, polled more than 150 IT business professionals and uncovers that while virtualization technology brings higher levels of speed and efficiency to businesses today, only 24% of respondents feel "very confident" their current management tools are sufficient to maintain existing IT service levels. Among those using specialized management tools for VMware environments, however, respondents were more than twice as likely to be "very confident" they could maintain IT service levels.

Additionally, nearly 48% report their number one challenge in tier-one production environments is isolating root cause problems within server virtualized environments. A key management challenge cited for VMware environments: the ability to map virtual machines to physical infrastructures, such as servers and applications, storage management, virtual security, and application performance monitoring.

Taking this one step further, the study relates that nearly 60% of respondents plan to deploy storage virtualization technologies in conjunction with VMware over the next 12 months. Chief among these storage technologies is block-based virtualization and thin provisioning (38%), followed by virtual SANs and file storage virtualization.

"As virtualization technologies continue to be deployed in larger and more complex production environments, greater emphasis will be placed on the day-to-day management needs of these environments," stated Bob Laliberte, Analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "Specifically the requirement for operations teams to have complete visibility of the virtual infrastructure and how that maps to the physical infrastructure will be critical. EMC continues to advance on its first mover advantage in this space by delivering new functionality for users to manage their physical and virtual infrastructures."

"VMware Infrastructure solutions have increased datacenter efficiency through consolidation, optimization, and automation at companies of all sizes across the globe," said Parag Patel, Vice President, Alliances, VMware. "But our customers are also telling us they want to support these infrastructures with tools capable of unifying management across both physical and virtualized environments and are asking us to help build the Virtual Datacenter OS. That's where solutions from partners like EMC become useful."

EMC's management solutions for VMware Infrastructures

"At EMC, we know our customers require a consistent strategy to manage information — a way to provide core services no matter where the information is coming from, how it's used or where it's going," said Chris Gahagan, EMC's Senior Vice President, Resource Management Software. "To accomplish this, they need a consistent and integrated approach to managing the entire end-to-end information infrastructure."

EMC's management solutions for VMware infrastructures seamlessly blend virtualization support into EMC's existing industry-leading IT management offerings. The solutions enable companies to apply ITIL processes and manage service levels for virtualized environments. They provide IT operations with a complete picture across the IT environment — mapping IT services across servers, applications, networks and storage — including inter-dependencies as well as any configuration changes that occur and their impact on core IT services. The solutions offer IT Service Management, virtual-to-physical dependency mapping, automated root cause analysis, storage management, and compliance with VMware best practices or industry regulations.

EMC's IT Service Management and ServiceDesk solution is EMC Infra — with new VMware discovery and virtual dependency mapping integration with EMC Application Discovery Manager (ADM) — bringing ITIL processes to the virtual environment. Enabling customers to manage their virtual infrastructure from within a unified service management configuration management database (CMDB), the solution introduces breakthrough levels of integrated process management and maturity for configuration and change management, process workflow, and incident/problem management. This is built on a core understanding of the interrelationships between virtual and physical components and their dependencies in delivering application service levels for critical business applications.

EMC Application Discovery Manager (ADM) 6.0 provides comprehensive insight into the delivery of business application services. ADM discovers business applications and the relationships among applications, application elements and services, the virtual machines that support them and their supporting physical IT infrastructure in VMware environments. Ultimately, these application relationships enable IT organizations to support their service levels to the business. This solution utilizes VMware's VI software developer kit and common information model APIs.

Key to ADM is the solution's "Virtual Listener," that passively "listens" to application traffic across a vSwitch — providing insight into the traffic and relationships across virtual machines otherwise "invisible" to the physical world. The solution establishes dependencies of virtual machines to one another in the delivery of business application services — and for the construction of data protection and disaster recovery plans for VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware Consolidated Backup.

With ControlCenter 6.1, EMC extends its leadership in managing virtual infrastructures to now include thin provisioned storage. ControlCenter 6.1 provides the industry's most comprehensive storage resource management (SRM) suite that delivers end-to-end visibility and control across VMware and thin-provisioned storage environments.

ControlCenter 6.1 offers support for EMC Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning — an enterprise-class implementation of thin provisioning. VMware and Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning offer common, synergistic benefits — including higher resource utilization, faster and simpler provisioning, and automated load-balancing across pooled resources. As a result, EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 and Symmetrix DMX-3 storage system customers are expected to recognize significant gains by deploying these technologies together. With ControlCenter 6.1, customers now have the tools required to effectively manage and reap the full benefits of deploying these technologies together.

ControlCenter 6.1 allows customers to create thin devices and pools, provision thin devices to physical as well as VMware ESX servers, track capacity consumption for thin devices and pools for virtual guests and ESX servers, graphically identify end-to-end relationships and topologies from virtual guests down to thin pools and data devices, and to monitor status and troubleshoot performance and availability issues for physical and virtual resources.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at http://www.EMC.com.

EMC, Smarts, ControlCenter, Infra, and ADM are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation

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