EMC takes on cloud vendors with Ionix

EMC has created a new division called Ionix that will offer a suite of enterprise management products.

“We’ve set a strategy given what is happening in IT,” said Clive Gold, EMC’s Marketing Chief Technology Officer for Australia.

“Organisations are making the move from physical infrastructure to virtualised infrastructure to the cloud,” Gold said.

EMC hopes Ionix will become the enterprise management platform enterprises use as they migrate to the new computing paradigms. To do so, it has evolved its existing management tools, integrated them and added technologies acquired through acquisitions (including Smarts, nLayers, Voyence, Infra, ControlCenter and Configuresoft products) to create Ionix, which Gold  added will compete with enterprise management rivals on price and through its modern design.

“None of the current management tools will make the journey [to the cloud]. Existing enterprise management products started with one technology then bolted on other pieces.” Poor integration and complexity was the result, leading to products that required heavy input from services organisations to achieve results.

“Typically, you buy $1 of software license and then need $50 of services,” Gold said. “We are providing benefits like root cause analysis for less than the services-only quote from others.”

Ionix will feature what Gold called “dynamic insight,” touted as a business process centric way to manage virtualised infrastructure so that administrators can understand applications’ dependencies on hardware, rather than manage the hardware itself.

Model-based control is another feature and will seek to help IT departments to automate processes and identify processes worthy of automation. The new products will also offer tools to help break down silos between different parts of an IT team and an enterprise.

Ionix will operate as a new division of EMC, along similar lines to the company’s existing RSA, Mozy, Iomega and VMware operations. The new arrangements will replace EMC’s resource services management group.

Gold said the new tools are vendor-and-technology agonistic and position EMC as a vendor capable of managing any collection of technology an organisation possesses.

“This is about end to end management of virtualised data centres,” he said. “EMC has always been a horizontal company: we do not care who created the ones and the zeroes. We do not care about the technology. This model-based management cuts across everything.”