Microsoft Gets Smarts with EMC
Microsoft Gets Smarts with EMC
March 28, 2007: Microsoft is licensing EMC Smarts network discovery and health monitoring technology to be included in a future version of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.
At the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2007 in San Diego, CA, System Center Operations Manager 2007, Bob Muglia was joined onstage by Howard Elias, executive vice president of the Global Services and Resource Management Software Group at EMC Corporation to announce the availability of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.
Microsoft is licensing EMC Smarts network discovery and health monitoring technology to be included in a future version of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. EMC is also developing network management and root-cause analysis management packs to be used in conjunction with System Center Operations Manager.
The partnership has been established to target organisations that face increased complexities in managing virtualised environments across the network and operating system.
Bob Muglia said, “By integrating EMC’s market-leading network management technology into Operations Manager and collaborating with EMC to develop a new cross-domain behavioural model that will enhance our management pack schema, we are able to give customers a true network-aware service management solution and improve operations management across disparate devices and systems to help pinpoint the root cause of service-affecting problems.”
EMC’s APAC spokesperson, Clive Gold, says, “IT has progressed. It’s become more complex, more specialised and more separated which is causing a burden in terms of delivering the end-user experience. This technology is putting it back together again. All current technology to help you manage – they all have a fixed view of the world. Smarts is the only technology that can manage a virtualised environment.”
While virtualisation has provided a means to reduce server infrastructure, Gold argues the administration costs involved in mapping and establishing rules dictating how the technology is deployed to the end-user has become more expensive.
EMC and Microsoft are also co-developing a new cross-domain behavioural model within the context of Operations Manager that will help customers pinpoint the root cause of service-affecting problems.
Gold says, “We’ve got customers who’ve spent hundreds of thousands in services to find out what their environment looks like. As soon as they change that, they need to re-create the rules. Smarts doesn’t cause that. It continuously monitors the environment and every time something changes it updates the model. This can be useful for root cause analysis when something goes wrong such as a network port dying. When this happens you get a flood of alarms from users, storage admin, application managers. While the alarms go off, you don’t necessarily know the cause of it. Smarts modelling allows you to pinpoint the problem and issues an alert about what is broken.”