EMC streamlines storage admin with Unisphere
EMC has released Unisphere, a management platform for its Clariion SAN and Celerra NAS storage platforms.
Announced in May 2010, the Unisphere management software has now come out of beta and is generally available, EMC said on Tuesday. The software combines the Clariion Navisphere and Celerra Manager management software into a single environment. "Now you just have one pane of glass — one application that manages it all," Brad Bunce, director of technical marketing for EMC's unified storage division, told ZDNet UK on Thursday.
Between May and Tuesday, the software was being tested at around 10 sites by EMC customers, according to Bunce. "When it goes to beta, it's pretty well-baked," he said, so no major changes were made to it during that time.
Unisphere should allow storage administrators to cut the number of clicks needed for standard tasks by more than 90 percent, according to EMC. The software is integrated with VMware vCenter, so it can manage virtual and physical storage. Admins can provision storage from a virtualised VMware vCenter Server in two clicks, EMC claims.
It is also possible to use the software to accelerate VMware server performance, with EMC claiming 10 times less input/output for standard tasks and 10 times the number of virtual machines per data store.
The software has also boosted the rate of virtual machine deployment, cloning, snapshotting and VMware Storage vMotion migrations by a factor of 10, the company says.
EMC says it will be adding features later. "It's a pluggable architecture that we'll be adding additional capabilities into," Bunce told ZDNet UK, with plans to add replication management in the future.
"VMware and EMC share a common vision for helping customers on the journey to the private cloud. Getting to the private cloud requires new levels of automation. EMC's new built-in tools unlock the power of VAAI [vStorage APIs for Array Integration] to automate the storage stack, further simplifying customers' virtualised environments," said Hatem Naguib, vice president of the EMC alliance at VMware, in an EMC statement.