EMC Unisphere Quick Notes

EMC is announcing a new management interface for its mid-tier storage line, that sounds and looks very promising.

Unisphere is a complete integration with vCenter, along with consolidation of management of CLARiiON and Celerra. This is intended to replace Navisphere and Celerra Manager. This framework also manages RecoverPoint/SE and will include PowerPath and is linked to Replication Manager. It also integrates Analyzer and Quality of Service Manager. It is integrated into lots of support, including PowerLink, without having to log into it separately.

This is Adobe Flex-based, so pretty light weight (not Java). There is a client for Windows, and a server, like off-array Navisphere. This is helpful with geographically dispersed infrastructure It is web-enabled. You don’t have to upgrade to FLARE 30 by using the server client, which is the other way to start using Unisphere.

I will elaborate on this know when I know more.

Here are some links to whitepapers, flash demos and videos.

http://www.emc.com/products/technology/unified-storage.htm?pid=Cloudcampaign-unified_campaign-070610

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8017-unisphere-element-manager.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mACVdai9YwE (Unisphere demo)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKubyt6XBcI&NR=1 (vCenter plug in demo)

On another topic, quickly...

EMC is also building in compression on the CLARiiON to reduce capacity, in the 2:1 range, intended for use in production. Technically, this isn’t deduplication, but more like white space reduction. FCoE support will be included in Unified Storage, to be announced this fall.