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EMC Ionix - From Physical to Virtual to Cloud…It’s a Whole New Ballgame

July 8th, 2009

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Today, we announced EMC Ionix - a next-generation IT management

EMC Ionix: It's a Whole New Ballgame

product family focused on accelerating a customer’s journey from physical IT to virtual IT to the cloud. Coming on the heels of our recent acquisition of Configuresoft, this represents the culmination of a 5-year journey itself, to create - through acquisition and organic growth - an extensive portfolio of technologies that provide IT management across the data center. These include EMC’s All-Star lineup of technologies: Smarts, nLayers, Voyence, Infra, ControlCenter and Configuresoft.

…And, as it’s All Star season for baseball, you’ll need to excuse me while I make a few analogies along the way.

Keeping Your “Eye on IT”

So, how did we come up with the name? Any T-ball parent knows the first thing you teach a Little Leaguer is to KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE BALL. As IT teams adopt virtualization, visibility is one of the hardest things to maintain - as virtualization enables a much more dynamic and elastic infrastructure which naturally evades the common approaches to monitoring. Perspective is also difficult to achieve: How do you see the whole field, the interactions, and the relationships?

Without visibility and perspective, there’s no way to automate and control the infrastructure. Ionix is all about helping you keep “Your Eye on IT.”

The Ionix Solution Set: IT Management Grand Slam

The EMC Ionix solution set covers four bases:

EMC Ionix for Service Discovery and Mapping: Tells you what you have and how it relates together - providing dynamic, passive, agentless discovery; application dependency mapping; discovery consolidation; across the data path, network path and application path.
EMC Ionix for Service Management: Enables rapid deployment and automation of ITIL processes - providing Service Desk and ITSM, CMDB, Service Catalog and Workflow.
EMC Ionix for Operations Intelligence: Provides monitoring and analysis, root-cause/rapid triage, cross-domain capabilities - for both physical and virtual environments.
EMC Ionix for Data Center Automation and Compliance: Keeps your configurations compliant across server, network and storage - providing server and network configuration management, storage management, configuration analytics, best-practices and compliance.

IT Management X-Factors: Moneyball for IT Management

Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics was the subject of a famous book (and potential movie) Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. The book focused on player strengths that were often overlooked by the bigger, more traditional powerhouse teams (dare I say “The Big Four” management vendors?) that were critical to putting together a next-generation baseball team in a more efficient way.

Similarly, EMC Ionix X-Factors are unique next-generation capabilities that unify IT management silos across physical and virtual environments and are often overlooked by older, more traditional toolsets:

Dyamic Insight: Moves you from being Device-Driven to being Service Driven through the power of service dependency and application mapping. These dynamic application relationships and dependencies automatically populate the Ionix Service Manager CMDB, enabling improved configuration change management and impact analysis.
Collaborative IT: Moves you from Information Silos to Information Sharing, leveraging the power of Web 2.0 and the power of community. By providing a free flow of in-context data between Ionix DCAC and Ionix IT Ops tools, the Ops or NOC team can more quickly identify root-cause and restore service by knowing what Storage, Server, or Network Configuration changes have occurred.
Model-Based Control: Moves you from brute-force and brittle manual-based processes to reliable and repeatable automated processes through the power of configuration, change, and process automation. By automating these manual, time-consuming configuration processes, IT teams can manage virtual and physical systems with a common tool set and consistent configuration and change processes compliant with best-practices and policies - in effect, managing more with less.

Teamwork - Turning the Double Play

There’s nothing like the perfect execution of the double play - poetry in motion. There are similar Ionix integration points that are critical examples - and in effect showcases - the collaboration and integration across functions and teams.

Let’s start with answering the question: What do I have? It requires two solutions to work together
- Without strong discovery and dependency mapping, CMDB deployments today struggles with (1) maintaining accurate CI data and (2) populating dependencies and relationships
- EMC’s rich dynamic insight across network, storage, server and applications- and especially EMC Ionix Application Discovery Manager’s (ADM) application dependency mapping - provide a hand and glove integration where the strength of best-in-class discovery complements the strength of the Ionix Service Manager CMDB and other integrations we provide
And when something goes wrong, where’s the problem?
- With a deep capability in automated root-cause analysis, the ability to open up trouble tickets based on the Ionix IT Operations model-based control codebook correlation technologies, provides a tremendous boost for incident and problem management processes. If the service desk team can learn about the problem in advance of the customer call, they can eliminate delays in service restoration and also be much more effective at pulling in the appropriate subject matter expert. Eighty percent of problem resolution time is spent finding the problem. Get the right team on the problem immediately
Once you determine a problem has occurred, you’ll need to make change - in compliance with best-practices and regulatory policies
- Using critical workflows for change approvals - CCBs and CABs - linking server, network, and storage change and config processes to the service change workflow is critical to achieve configuration compliance and control
An anytime a problem occurs, what’s the first question the Ops team asks: What’s changed?
- The answer often comes back as, “Nothing!” As change and config issues contribute to many of the operational faults the ops team troubleshoots, the ability to view server or network change events from the operational topology map is a critical form of collaborative IT - helping teams work together - to navigate in context from the operational view to detailed config view - enables incident/problem processes to leverage change and config processes.

EMC Ionix is moving along the same journey as our customers - a next-generation IT management journey that takes them from physical IT to virtual IT to cloud. We’ll continue to invest in broadening the All-Star-studded lineup to help accelerate this journey - providing IT teams unparalleled insight and control across their physical and virtual IT environments.

Keep your eye on Ionix - it’s a homerun.

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