"Because of our unique business requirements, we have had to very rapidly make a large amount of disk available, and under the old scheme we couldn't do it fast enough," he says. "This way, we just turn it on."
Eriksen concedes that OpenScale's monitoring aspects seem "a little intrusive," but he points out that Deloitte already uses the call-home feature on the Symmetrix boxes that communicates the health status of the systems back to EMC. On a side note, he says the firm didn't move to the newer Symmetrix DMX because it already had two other 8830s in house and "we weren't ready to replatform... I wouldn't call us skeptics, but, quite frankly, the [DMX] didn't have the capacity we needed." The DMX provides a maximum of 42 Tbytes of raw capacity.
OpenScale is based on technology developed by Luminate Software Corp., a performance monitoring software company EMC bought in September 2001. EMC had previously offered a service that proactively monitored customers' servers through a service called EMCLink.net (see EMC Retools Monitoring Service).
Down the road, EMC plans to add support to OpenScale for heterogeneous storage environments, which would let it monitor competitors' hardware, such as that from HP or Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP), says Raftery. That pretty much turns OpenScale into a sales tool for EMC, doesn't it? "Sure it does," he says. Always thinking, those EMC guys.
Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
