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Rounding out the company's comprehensive software portfolio for IT configuration and compliance management, EMC Corporation the world leader in information infrastructure solutions -- recently unveiled EMC Storage Configuration Advisor (SCA). The automated management software is directly aimed at helping storage teams minimize their operational costs by addressing the most frequent cause of service-affecting events, improper Storage Area Network (SAN) configuration.

Storage Configuration Advisor now joins EMC's IT Compliance Analyzer – Application Edition, VoyenceControl and Server Configuration Manager as the newest piece of the company's broad portfolio of IT compliance and configuration management software. EMC now supports cross-domain IT management by offering change, configuration and compliance management across the storage, network, application and server domains.

"Experience has shown that more than half of SAN outages occur due to improper configurations that are a result of either poorly designed or executed change," said Bob Laliberte, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "With all the moves, adds and changes that take place daily, SAN administrators struggle to maintain adequate service levels for the business."

Leveraging agentless discovery to simplify management and reduce deployment times, the solution conducts near real-time tracking of the storage infrastructure to proactively detect vulnerabilities to ensure customers are maintaining compliance with internal configuration policies, vendor guidelines or industry best-practices. Providing an audit trail of SAN changes and rule violations – flagging potential service-affecting events before they occur – the software also offers customers extensive reporting capabilities with detailed analysis of configurations, compliance breeches and service levels. The end result for customers is a dramatic reduction in operational costs within the data center by reducing time spent on resolving storage configuration issues and downtime associated with human error.

"Businesses today are under increasing pressure to minimize both the risks and costs associated with their ever-changing data centers. Proving their IT environments are compliant -- with both regulatory standards and internal corporate IT policies and best practices for configuration and security -- is now mandatory for businesses to ensure successful operations," said Chris Gahagan, EMC's Senior Vice President, Resource Management Software. "By adding EMC Storage Configuration Advisor to our broad suite of automated IT configuration and compliance solutions, EMC is one of the only companies on the market today enabling customers to fully validate IT compliance across their entire data centers."

Storage Configuration Advisor eliminates the need for cumbersome and ineffective manual processes, enabling customers to automate the process of validating storage infrastructure configuration against both industry and internally defined best practices and policies. The solution helps IT dramatically improve their service levels and operational efficiencies by eliminating the most frequent cause of service-affecting events – improper configuration due to poorly executed changes. Key functionality of Storage Configuration Advisor includes:

• Best Practice Policy Management: The solution's built-in templates enable users to quickly define and modify policies to meet operational requirements. Templates are designed around common industry best practices for physical and logical connectivity, path management, and hardware/software configuration support. Policy wizards help users through the process of modifying templates define or update policies.
• Agentless Discovery and Configuration Analysis: The software leverages quick, easy-to-deploy agentless discovery and uses non-intrusive, standards-based discovery of all physical and logical SAN elements and relationships. By creating and maintaining an accurate map of the storage infrastructure, Storage Configuration Advisor helps IT operations ensure the availability of critical IT services by: Validating infrastructure alignment with organizational policies and industry best practices; and, linking configuration problems with associated changes. These processes can be automated to eliminate reliance on external scripts or error-prone, manually intensive activities.
• Change Tracking: Storage Configuration Advisor monitors for change to objects discovered in the data center, providing a full audit trail for all changes made to the storage environment. When changes are incorrectly implemented, the solution allows users to quickly recognize a policy breach. The software also documents change history to help analyze breaches and trends to improve change processes and resource planning.
• Storage Service Analytics: Once best-practice policies are enabled, violations can be viewed and propagated through the dashboard, SNMP traps, or e-mail. Storage Configuration Advisor gives visibility into active policy breaches, configuration changes, and breach resolution times. The software offers a number of built-in reports, including: Configuration Reports, providing detailed configuration analysis of the storage infrastructure; and Compliance and Service Reports, which display metrics on policy breaches, causes and resolution.

Storage Configuration Advisor is a critical piece of EMC's resource management software portfolio, providing advanced solutions enabling customers to automate their data center operations. With a unique set of products designed to help customers cut costs while continually improving service delivery, EMC's products conduct comprehensive discovery, compliance, analysis, automation and visualization across the physical and virtual infrastructure and applications throughout the data center.

This automation process enables companies to discover what IT resources they have, check for IT compliance to policies, isolate root-cause problems, and fix any issues. Leveraging this model-based, intelligent software, customers can take a service-centric approach to IT management and gain insight into how their information infrastructures support key business services.

Storage Configuration Advisor will be available in June and is priced based on storage capacity. For more information on EMC's resource management portfolio visit www.emcitmanagement.com.

About EMC
EMC Corporation is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. For more information visit www.EMC.com.

SOURCE: EMC Corporation