EMC Arms Customers With Enhanced Network And IT Operations Management Solutions Further Driving Their Journey To The Private Cloud

HOPKINTON, Mass., April 27 (Interop, Las Vegas 2010) -- Reinforcing its continued innovation in delivering one of the market's leading automated network and IT operations management solutions, EMC Corporation today announced key enhancements to its flagship IT infrastructure monitoring and analysis portfolio, EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence (formerly Smarts). The new technologies provide core network management functionality to help customers transition from a physical to virtual IT infrastructure - and eventually - a private cloud model.

"As companies continue to virtualize their IT infrastructures, they are excited by the cost efficiency and agility this model may bring," said Jim Frey, research director, Enterprise Management Associates. "The real roadblock is 'how are we going to manage this new infrastructure?' To smooth the virtualization transition and truly achieve its potential advantages, they need automated IT management solutions that enable them to discover all of the dynamic elements and relationships while also rapidly identifying and resolving the root-cause of failures and degradations. With EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, EMC is taking a major step forward in helping customers achieve this goal."

Key to the announcement is integrated network configuration and operations management capabilities and expanded virtualization support. With more than 60 percent of outages caused by mis-configurations, the correlation of root-cause analysis issues with network change history is essential. By integrating Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence with EMC?? Ionix?? Network Configuration Manager (formerly Voyence), customers can avoid network configuration issues and also correlate device outages to recent change activity for faster resolution.

"EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence is truly a revolutionary solution in network management, helping our clients power their integrated infrastructure management (IIM)) initiatives," said Michael Cruise, Managing Solution Director for CompuCom - a leading IT outsourcing specialist providing infrastructure management, application development, architecture and governance services, and procurement, deployment, and maintenance of hardware and software. "By leveraging such innovations as the new integration points between the network configuration and IT operations management solutions from Ionix, CompuCom has been able to realize nearly a 10 percent gain in operational efficiency operation and approximately $550,000 in savings during the first year of its implementation."

Other key enhancements to the solution suite include:

"EMC Ionix allows Interoute to proactively monitor its IP network and respond to customer issues in a timely manner. Interoute has leveraged their investment in EMC Ionix by using it as an alarm aggregator for all its network events," said Chris Pinnock, Director, Software Development, Interoute Communications Limited - owner operator of Europe's most advanced and densely connected voice and data network, encompassing over 55,000 km of lit fibre with 8 hosting data centers and 32 co-location centers. "Because of its design, Interoute has been able to easily extend EMC Ionix and integrate it with its CRM system for ticketing, its inventory system for impact and, more recently, its business intelligence system for reporting. This work has largely been done in-house and at a low cost.""The IT Operations center is at the front lines of the data center, ensuring the reliability and availability of core IT services. The ability to effectively monitor and manage the IT environment - proactively identifying and responding to problems - significantly impacts the quality of service customers experience, as well as the costs related to delivering and maintaining those services," said Jay Mastaj, General Manager and Senior Vice President, EMC Ionix. "With the rise in virtualization and the increased complexity of IT environments, customers demand a new approach that shifts the burden of monitoring and management away from people and manual processes and into automated analytical systems. EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence IS that solution."

The newly enhanced portfolio will be showcased exclusively at Interop Las Vegas, Booth #527. Additionally EMC Ionix Director of Product Management, Richard Whitehead, will be discussing this new solution at an Interop panel hosted by Jim Metzler of Metzler and Associates entitled, "Advances in Network Management," on Thursday, April 29 at 11:30 am.

EMC Ionix solutions continue to be ranked as the market's leading solutions for IT management. Gartner, Inc. recently recognized EMC with a "Strong Positive" rating in its newest report "MarketScope for Network Configuration and Change Management." Addressed by Ionix Network Configuration Manager, the report can be found here. For more information on Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, please see the newest EMA whitepaper on the portfolio here.