By Ronald James P. Panis
Correspondent

VIRTUALIZATION and cloud computing may be the rage across the IT infrastructures of various companies and organizations, but EMC Corp. warns that proper tools are essential to effectively manage these environments.

In a meeting with the IT press, chief technical architect of EMC South Asia, Sal Fernando, stressed the importance of unparalleled insight and control over virtual IT infrastructures. “In a fast changing world today, people are virtualizing their environments – abstracting the physical IT, which is a very good way to reduce infrastructure, improve service levels and secure environment,” he began.

“If you are unable to manage these environments, virtualization falls apart. When it breaks, virtualization is a nightmare because you do not know what’s wrong or where it has gone wrong,” Fernando continued. “Without the management tools, you lose control of the relatively straightforward physical environment,” he added.

To help customers avoid this dilemma, EMC has come up with the Ionix IT management software, which Fernando called as a “revolutionary EMC concept.”

With Ionix, EMC created a software “from the ground up that works in a virtualized and physical environment, as well as gives customers the opportunity to manage their infrastructure in a cloud environment.” Ionix software combines automated server compliance and configuration solutions from EMC’s bevy of market-leading unified management software portfolio, which consists of Smarts, nLayers, Voyence, Infra, ControlCenter and the recently acquired Configuresoft.

“What we’ve done is integrate [these technologies] into one single view to manage environments,” noted Fernando. Managing director and president Henry Velasco of Sandz Philippines Solutions Inc., an EMC customer, lauded this advantage offered by Ionix. “Nobody has really adopted a unified systems management as most of [the competitors] have point solutions,” said Velasco. With Ionix, he shared that companies can manage resources even if it comes from other vendors. “[It’s] not a rip-and-replace type of technology, but a complimentary one,” concurred Fernando.

Management is primarily achieved by Ionix as it maps out to customers the technologies proliferating in their infrastructure. Through Service Discovery and Mapping, Ionix offers visibility into complex applications and their physical and virtual dependencies as well as let customers accurately chart servers and applications.

Citing a study in the US, Fernando noted that 15% of devices in a corporation have no identifiable function. “They are sitting there and nobody knows why they are there; but they are powered, and taking up precious space,” he added. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, only 10 to 15% of server CPUs are utilized while the rest just consume energy, costing customers money that could have been used for other purposes. Mostly it’s because some companies in major industries are clueless as to what technologies are plugged in their infrastructure, and often, they are afraid they will upset the infrastructure by detaching a device.

“Most people don’t know how to manage [these environments] because they don’t know what they have,” explained the EMC executive. By highlighting the underutilized devices in the system, Ionix as Fernando believes, informs customers and enables them decide how to configure their infrastructure as well as take control of the environment.

With IT operations intelligence, Ionix can monitor services across both physical and virtual environments. Lamenting how there are numerous IT professionals lacking the IT forensics intelligence needed for the job, Fernando assures this technology can pinpoint what exactly went wrong, skipping the blame game.

Ionix also enables customers to scale their virtualized data center sans any staff increases, to assess configuration compliance, and to rapidly deploy scalable and cost-effective IT infrastructure library (ITIL) service management. Fernando also pointed out that Ionix no longer requires a need for “agents” hence making deployment much easier; it can also predict system behavior, identifying and preempting operators for any behavioral changes.

An example of Ionix in action is the local telcos adherence to the National Telecommunication Commission (NTC) ruling to extend the expiration of the 30 pesos load from one day to 10. “All the telcos are using Symmetrix which has Ionix-embedded technology, and just like that they were able to cater to that ruling right away,” shared Velasco.

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