EMC Heats Up Competition with Data Center Big Four

EMC took square aim at the "big four" data center management software players-HP, IBM, CA and BMC- this week when it launched Ionix. The new Ionix business unit and brand name are designed to make more noise about what analysts call an under-appreciated set of broad capabilities in data-center management tools.

The Ionix suite of network, systems and process management tools are so tightly integrated and so useful, says one longtime EMC storage customer, that his IT group bought the full set for its data-center management even though the company was shifting to rival NetApp's storage products.

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"Our experience with the suite was a lot better than we expected," says Hans Keller, senior director of IT operations for Erickson Retirement Communities, a privately held company that owns and manages 20 health-care facilities, has 11,000 employees and generates $1 billion per year in revenue.

"We had this rudimentary set of tools to manage our WAN, service desk and systems but didn't give much insight into how our enterprise is functioning," Keller says. "At the same time we were getting ready to relocate a data center, so we needed to be able to do a lot of discovery on assets and the interfaces between them so when we did move we could do it without interrupting services, and end up with an enterprise monitoring service that was more appropriate to our size."

Keller replaced tools such as What's Up Gold for WAN management and TouchPaper service-desk software with the Ionix suite which, unlike most beta testers, he paid for upfront.

"You talk to the Big Four [HP, IBM, CA and BMC] and you get a white box you get to open up and then try to configure," Keller says. "We wanted something based on best practices so we didn't have to be experts when we started but it could grow with us as we became more expert."

EMC has done a good job of lining up and coordinating the data center management assets it has bought since 2005, analysts say.

But EMC hasn't gotten as much notice or recognition as it deserves for the set of capabilities it built (and now will market under the Ionix banner), according to Dennis Drogseth, VP and analyst with Enterprise Management Associates. "Their growth has been very methodical. They got SMARTS for event automation, nLayers for app dependencies, Voyance and eventually ConfigureSoft for net and systems configuration, Infra for service desk. In my opinion, all of these really do create a kind of next-generation set of technologies."

Ionix "which sounds like an exercise in branding, and to some extent is," Drogseth says, was derived from the phrase "eye on IT," according to EMC press materials.

The new branding is designed to help the company present a range of options for the automation and management of various aspects of data center operations across physical and virtual servers, networks and storage networks, according to an EMC spokesman.

While the new name and service-oriented descriptions sound relatively simple, "there are a lot of moving pieces here," according to Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "EMC has been pulling these pieces together for a couple of years-configuration and change management, provisioning from a lot of different angles. What they're trying to do now is bring it under one naming umbrella and integrate them all more tightly."