EMC adds VMware app reporting for DR and backup |
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By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer
21 May 2008 | SearchStorage.co.uk |
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EMC is giving Application Discovery Manager (ADM) a refresh by adding reporting on virtual hosts to its application topology maps and more integration with EMC IT Compliance Analyzer to enforce application policies. However, it still hasn't linked that analysis with storage utilisation.
"I will say stay tuned," said Chris Gahagan, senior vice president for EMC's resource management software group while launching ADM 6.0 this week at EMC World in Las Vegas. For now, the product is complementary but not integrated with EMC Control Center's reporting on VMware storage utilisation.
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They have to be careful not to advantage EMC over competitors when it comes to VMware as the market is heating up.
Robin Harris
analyst, Data Mobility
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Data Mobility analyst Robin Harris said he's surprised that reporting with VMware storage utilisation isn't more advanced. "I do find it odd that a company 86% owned by the leading independent storage company wouldn't be further along with this stuff," he said of VMware. But, he added, "I don't think there are that many development engineers who really understand this intersection between storage and server virtualisation], at least not in terms of the problems people are finding with the rate of growth in the market."
Another analyst, John Webster of Illuminata, said it appears EMC is picking its sports for integration and sees greater needs than reporting for VMware. "You can get [storage reporting for VMware] from other places, so it's not a big deal," he said. "EMC is going toward more integration of things, and it may be leaving some of these questions in abeyance while they figure out where [integration] is most appropriate."
Harris added, "They also have to be very careful not to advantage EMC over other storage competitors when it comes to VMware as the [storage virtualisation] market is heating up."
Other applications can report on VMware storage utilisation, including ECC and third-party tools such as NetApp subsidiary Onaro's SANScreen software, Akorri's BalancePoint software, Symantec's CommandCentral 5.0 and TekTools' Profiler for VMware.
With this upgrade, EMC has improved the granularity of reporting and change management features in ADM. These include reporting on which applications are running on which guest hosts, which other physical and virtual hosts those applications are communicating with at a given moment, and what protocol they're speaking to do so.
Like Onaro's Business Continuity Edition, the new ADM will provide that type of granular analysis for replication, disaster recovery configurations and data protection. In other words, it will determine which servers are protected according to policies and identify servers that aren't being backed up properly. Another storage-related use for the product, added Gahagan, is managing dependencies during data migrations.
The software comes on an appliance that contains a new Virtual Listener that monitors traffic through the VMware Virtual Switch (vSwitch) to avoid the use of software agents. Gahagan said integration with Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix's XenServer will follow. The product is available now for a starting list price of $50,000 (£25,400).
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