EMC offers infrastructure manager to automate operations

At the VMWorld conference in San Francisco today, EMC will be announcing a beta program of the EMC Inonix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0, which brings together the management of infrastructure's network, compute and storage layers.

What it means, the company said, is that companies will be empowered to more easily transition from physical to virtual to private cloud infrastructures. What it does is automates more than 60 operations that would normally be performed manually - a shift that frees resources and improves a company's operating expenses.

It's no secret that, within IT departments, a disproportionate amount of IT resources are spent "keeping the lights on," or managing the infrastructure. The EMC program certainly reduces the number of man hours needed to keep the operation humming - but does it also reduce the number of IT jobs? Sure, a shift like this could force some job reshuffling - but EMC argued that companies are increasingly needing IT staffs to do other work, notably app development.

It used to be that there was someone to manager the servers. someone to keep an eye on the network and someone to address storage concerns. Now, there's one person who is the cloud infrastructure guy, said Chad Sakac, vice president of VMware Technology Alliance. And the others are studying how to develop cloud apps and meet the other needs that a company has.

In a statement, Jay Mastaj, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMC Ionix, said:

With EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0, we’re delivering a unique competitive advantage to our customers by providing a comprehensive management system for the entire unified infrastructure - rather than throwing together management as a collection of three separate components. Only EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager will empower our customers to simplify management of the Vblock-based computing, network, and storage infrastructure.