EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0 in Customer Beta

August 31, 2010

This new offering completely transforms infrastructure management by unifying, and making service-driven, the management of network, compute and storage layers. Ionix UIM 2.0 will empower companies to more easily make the transition from physical to virtual to private cloud infrastructures by unifying and automating the management of Vblock™ Infrastructure Packages, an element of the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition formed by Cisco, EMC, and VMware.

Ionix UIM 2.0 is squarely aimed at simplifying the management of Vblock unified infrastructure systems. By automating over 60 discrete operations that would normally be performed manually through disparate element management tools, Ionix UIM 2.0 is intended to help customers dramatically reduce their operating expenses with improved efficiency and operations that scale, enhance overall service quality with robust and repeatable processes, and improve service levels through infrastructure agility and elasticity. Configuring the underlying infrastructure to support a small sized VMware cluster can take up to 10x longer done via element managers than via UIM v2.0, as shown at VMworld.

"Vblocks are pre-integrated to deliver IT to the business in whole new way. Customers can now accelerate their journey to pervasive virtualization and cloud computing while lowering risk and operating expenses," said Phil Harris, Vice President, Engineering, VCE. "However a critical success factor to fully realize these benefits is a new approach to unified management. With EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0, customers will have a single point of management and full provisioning automation across network, compute and storage environments."

"As a fast-growing, mid-sized enterprise, our ability to act nimbly and efficiently is key to our success," said Brian Burch, Vice President of Global Infrastructure, Kemet Corporation. "We specifically chose to work with the VCE coalition to help us achieve these goals by deploying a Vblock Infrastructure Package that will accelerate virtualizing our IT infrastructure so we can increase business agility and reduce operating expenses. We're very excited about participating in the EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0 beta because based on what we've seen so far, the product clearly has the promise to take IT as a service to the next level and make it a reality for our infrastructure."

Today's announcement of VMware vCloud Director (now available) will complement UIM by providing a cloud service management portal. Once UIM moves towards general availability, the two products will enable full end-to-end service automation from application and virtual machine through network, server and storage. By using a service-driven approach to managing both virtual resources and the infrastructure they are hosted in, IT organizations and cloud service providers will be able to experience new levels of service agility and radical improvements to operational efficiency.

"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," said Jay Mastaj, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMC Ionix. "EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager will empower our customers to simplify management of the Vblock-based computing, network, and storage infrastructure as a service -- from a single Vblock to an internal cloud to a private cloud."

The customer beta program for Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0 is currently underway.