EMC Intros ControlCenter 6.0

HOPKINTON, Mass. -- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today unveiled EMC ControlCenter 6.0, the newest version of the company's flagship storage resource management (SRM) software. The software is a market leading SRM solution for managing storage discovery, problems, compliance, change, and reporting in virtualized and physical server environments. Acting as a complement to VMware VirtualCenter, EMC's ControlCenter offers customers extensive support for VMware Infrastructure 3 software and delivers significant improvements in flexibility and customization for SRM reporting.

"Virtual infrastructure provides simplified IT management for data centers of any size. But VMware Infrastructure customers also tell us they want to surround their virtualized environments with diagnostic tools that provide complete end-to-end visibility to account for the physical infrastructure," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. "EMC ControlCenter enables our joint customers to simply and effectively manage storage resources in mixed virtual and physical environments."

"Companies across the globe are deploying virtualization software to increase efficiencies, lower costs and enable business agility. While businesses are realizing many of these benefits today, IT tools have lagged behind," said Dave Russell, Vice President, Gartner, Inc. "Lacking the ability to comprehensively discover, map, provision and report on virtual server environments, users cannot effectively connect the dots between the virtual and physical worlds and fully realize the cost efficiencies of virtualization."

Answering customer demand, ControlCenter 6.0 offers comprehensive support for VMware Infrastructure, including discovery, problem management, compliance, change management, provisioning, and reporting of VMware ESX Server host and guest servers —fully enabling SRM in virtual environments. EMC ControlCenter complements VMware's VirtualCenter software by providing end-to-end storage relationship information -- from a VMware ESX server host to the physical array devices. Users can view properties, capacity and usage information for a VMware ESX server host and corresponding virtual machines. The solution discovers individual VMware ESX Server guests – including guest name, OS version and IP address – and reports the capacity of virtual disk files and raw storage devices mapped to each virtual machine guest. ControlCenter 6.0 also enables users to provision, mask and zone storage to VMware ESX server hosts.

"One of the primary reasons we continue to lead in the storage management space is that we listen to our customers. And ControlCenter 6.0 is no exception," said Chris Gahagan, EMC's Senior Vice President, Resource Management Software. "From SRM for virtualized environments to dramatic improvements in flexible and custom reporting, ControlCenter 6.0 is designed specifically to meet the needs of our 7,000-plus customers worldwide."ControlCenter 6.0 also offers customers significant improvements in flexible and custom reporting. With the introduction of multiple new reporting methods, users can easily access the breadth and depth of data discovered by ControlCenter and tailor it to specific business requirements. For example, the new Query Builder feature within EMC StorageScope™ software provides open access to a centralized reporting repository as well as customized reporting. Additionally, ControlCenter 6.0 now brings EMC ControlCenter StorageScope and EMC ControlCenter StorageScope File Level Reporter (FLR) together, providing a single interface and infrastructure for enterprise-wide and file-level reporting.

"As a long-time EMC customer, we've found ControlCenter permits us to more effectively manage storage. By enabling more admins to provision storage, we experience dramatically quicker time-to-deliver server build times," said Lori Motzko, Windows Manager, SHPS. "Now, with new reporting functionality and support for VMware Infrastructure, ControlCenter provides us with an even better all around storage management tool, allowing us to accomplish better storage provisioning, management and forecasting."

As part of ControlCenter 6.0, customers also benefit from expanded heterogeneous platform support. The solution expands active management capabilities for Hitachi storage arrays and supports vendors' storage platforms with CTP-certified SMI-S 1.1 providers.

EMC Corp.