EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, today announced EMC ControlCenter™ SAN Advisor, software that represents a major step forward in helping customers maintain high availability of today's complex, heterogeneous storage area networks (SANs). SAN Advisor helps enterprises significantly reduce the downtime risks associated with using manual, error-prone methods for ongoing SAN maintenance and change management.

Integrated into the EMC ControlCenter family of storage management software, SAN Advisor features an automated data import engine that downloads detailed SAN environment data and uses it for analysis, baselining, SAN modeling and predictive change management testing. SAN Advisor helps ensure peak availability by automatically validating the SAN against 130 rules for availability and array configuration. It also validates the SAN against the EMC E-Lab™ Interoperability Support Matrix, EMC's comprehensive storage best practices and device compatibility database.

SAN Advisor is especially useful for planning and modeling enterprise infrastructures to support information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies, as well as for managing SAN growth and maintenance. For example, SAN Advisor can validate the compatibility of firmware or driver updates and proactively simulate "what-if" scenarios before adding new devices to the environment. SAN Advisor is also a helpful tool for resellers and systems integrators to help accelerate delivery of SAN design and implementation services.

"Initially, our experience has been that SAN Advisor has helped in quickly generating the configuration of some new storage environments, reducing our risk for errors and providing documentation and diagrams for us far quicker and simpler than any manual methods we've used previously," said Thomas Locke, Senior SAN Engineer, Countrywide Financial Corporation.

"Designing and maintaining a complex, heterogeneous SAN is a time-consuming and often error-prone task," said Chris Gahagan, Senior Vice President, Storage Management Software, EMC Corporation. "SAN Advisor allows users to automate and simplify this task by leveraging the EMC E-Lab's unrivaled expertise in device interoperability and SAN design, built on an investment of more than 10 years in research, development and testing. Customers can ultimately reduce downtime risks and save on SAN maintenance and change management time and cost."

Reduces Operational Costs of SAN Change Management

SAN Advisor leads users through a streamlined change management process that helps them automatically import and validate existing SAN configurations. Users receive automatic monthly updates from the EMC E-Lab Support Matrix to ensure that the latest device data and configurations are supported in the SAN Advisor software.

The software also allows for SAN design simulation to predict the impact of proposed changes to the environment. SAN Advisor aids users in building detailed action plans for change implementation. After storage administrators implement those changes, the SAN validation engine becomes the final change management step to verify that the action plan was correctly implemented.

Pricing

SAN Advisor will be sold worldwide directly through EMC and its Velocity channel partners. Starting at $5,000 USD, SAN Advisor will be sold on a supported storage capacity basis. It will also be sold as a bundled component of the EMC ControlCenter Planning & Provisioning package.