EMC Smartens Its NAS

EMC today rolled out a management and diagnostic tool for its NAS systems, along with new high-end and low-end Celerra NAS boxes. (See EMC Unveils EMC Smarts.)

The Smarts IP Availability Manager for NAS is the first step EMC has taken to integrate its storage with technology acquired in its $260 million purchase of Systems Management Arts Inc. (Smarts) in December 2004. (See EMC Gets Smarts and EMC 'Paying Too Much' for Smarts.)

Smarts locates and identifies devices and systems in an IP-based network, gathers information about them, and correlates the data to determine status and make predictions. The company's claim to fame has been a specialized modeling language that helps pinpoint the root cause of a performance or connectivity problem.

The IP Availability Manager for NAS extends that capability to NAS devices, identifying root causes of performance degradation or failure, whether those are inside or outside the box.

Handy, sure, but still a far cry from the system-wide storage management execs have promised. Indeed, this offering appears to scratch the surface of storage management by merely extending Smarts' correlation from LAN file servers to NAS ones. There is no Fibre Channel support so far -- not surprising, given that Smarts is largely IP-based.