EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced a breakthrough software solution that automates fault management for storage—EMC Smarts® Storage Insight for Availability. Storage Insight for Availability leverages EMC ControlCenter® storage management software and fully automates root-cause and impact analysis of availability problems across the Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN), resulting in dramatic reduction in downtime and mean time to repair.

Storage Insight for Availability leverages data and topology directly from ControlCenter to auto-discover SAN network elements and their inter-relationships. The built-in analysis engine automatically identifies the impact of failures on related infrastructure elements, including host devices, file systems and EMC PowerPath logical paths—as well as EMC Celerra network-attached storage systems and file shares.

“As any storage manager today can attest, fixing an IT problem is relatively easy once the failure is diagnosed. The difficulty lies in finding the root cause among the myriad of events that appear on the management console,” said Chris Gahagan, Senior Vice President, Resource Management, EMC Software Group. “EMC Smarts Storage Insight for Availability is able to turn thousands of confusing events into a handful of meaningful notifications. This high level of automation saves time and resources across multiple groups—ensuring the right team gets to work on the right problem, right away.”

By intelligently correlating events across the Fibre Channel storage infrastructure, Storage Insight for Availability pinpoints the following Fibre Channel SAN availability failures as root-cause problems:

• EMC Symmetrix® unit, volume, front-end director and port link failures
• EMC CLARiiON® unit, volume, storage processor and port link failures
• Fibre Channel SAN switch units and port links
• Host bus adapter cards and port links

Because Storage Insight for Availability is built upon the Smarts semantic data model—which maps devices, relationships, behaviors and interactions across all layers of the SAN and IP networks – the solution is able to reveal relationships between IP network and storage devices. This model updates automatically as the environment changes, resulting in a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. When used in conjunction with other EMC Smarts solutions, the data model can extend across networks, systems and applications to the business service level.

Also core to Storage Insight is the Smarts cross-domain correlation technology—the ability to identify root-cause problems and their impacts across technology domains. Storage Insight for Availability and EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager are exceptional in their ability to correlate events, root-cause problems and impacts across the Fibre Channel SAN and IP network. Cross-domain correlation gives users the option of using Storage Insight for Availability to automate root-cause analysis in the Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure or to add IP Availability Manager to gain insight into IT resource health and streamlining processes across the data center and network operations center.

"Given the complexity of today’s enterprise IT infrastructures, a single failure in one domain can literally cause a flood of alarms and duplicate trouble-tickets throughout network, storage and applications infrastructures," said Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "By cross-correlating root-cause problems, Smarts Storage Insight can rapidly determine whether the problem exists in the IP infrastructure or the Fibre Channel SAN. Obviously, this immediately eliminates finger-pointing, and productivity increases because administrators are no longer wasting valuable resources chasing the same problem."

EMC Smarts Storage Insight for Availability is driven by information lifecycle management (ILM)—a powerful IT customer strategy based on the fact that not all information is created equal. This strategy enables enterprises to more effectively manage their growing volumes of information—from creation to disposal—according to the information’s changing value to the business. EMC information infrastructure solutions such as EMC Smarts are at the heart of this mission, helping organizations manage, use, protect and share their information assets more efficiently and cost effectively.

EMC Smarts Storage Insight for Availability is available now.