Tag Archives: ProSphere

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Keeping People At The Center Of The Data Center

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How do you keep the human element in tech?

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Trying to prevent user problems is the primary job of user experience design teams at technology firms. Among the unsung heroes of tech, design teams are responsible for generating intuitive user interfaces. Lost in that purgatory between social and hard sciences, design teams balance observation and human needs with technology to realize that all important customer experience that contributes to product adoption and success.

Human error still accounts for the majority of unplanned outages in the data center. A Gartner study I cited in a recent blog post states that 80% of the outages impacting mission-critical services are expected to be caused by people and process issues.  

Good user design involves subject matter experts, site visits and contextual inquiries, and personas. While good design alone will not eliminate fat-fingering keys, it can minimize human errors. The fact that we are all now conditioned by our experiences with personal gadgets such as mobile devices cause expectations to run high for what we deem acceptable interfaces in the workplace. Continue reading →

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Storage Resource Management Without Spreadsheets

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When did Excel spreadsheets become storage management software?

Excel spreadsheets were not intended for storage administrators tracking capacity utilization and needs, but targeted rather towards accountants and others working with numbers.  Out of necessity, however, spreadsheets have become the tool of the trade for understanding the storage landscape. Many EMC customers tell me, even with this method, they are still flying blindly with only a stove pipe view of their storage use and availability.

Data growth and cloud computing are going to change this behavior, though. The latest IDC Digital Universe Study estimates that data will double every two years between now and 2020. This growth underscores the importance of getting the most out of storage investments. With about 93% of all organizations using or planning to use server virtualization, storage is the next big opportunity for automation. Software-defined storage offers the promise of storage abstraction, pooling, and centralized management but in the meantime, some might think makeshift solutions like using spreadsheets have to suffice. That is not true. There are solutions available today for getting a data center wide view of storage use, availability, and performance. Continue reading →

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Service Assurance In The Cloud

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How do you provide service assurance in your virtualized data center or cloud?

Read any blog, online article, or hard copy publication about the IT industry and you will likely see much about the future of IT. But, it is the every-day challenges and victories that often determine success in the long run.

While the industry considers more logical abstractions to further loosen the ties between business processes and physical infrastructure, IT management needs to assure ongoing application availability and performance in virtual and cloud deployments with a high rate of data growth. IT needs solutions that provide a complete picture of data center health across compute, network, and storage.

The just-announced EMC Storage Resource Management Suite provides service assurance from application-to-storage by monitoring and reporting on availability, performance, and compliance. It combines EMC storage management and analysis with technologies from the recent Watch4net acquisition to ensure application consistency in dynamic data centers. Continue reading →

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Get To Decisions Quickly With EMC DataBridge

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Are you a spreadsheet engineer or a mashup builder?

These monikers are colorful terms for sure. But, they are also descriptive of the choices you will soon have for constructing meaningful views into your IT infrastructure data.

Now that the EMC World hangover has subsided, I thought it might be timely to go deeper into one of the more interesting technology announcements made at this annual event. For this purpose, I enlisted the help of our crack product team and without much effort convinced the chief architect behind the EMC DataBridge enterprise software solution to explain some of the concepts herself.

Every IT organization needs to have visibility into their environment. And, there is no shortage of products and solutions that provide deep insights into your compute, network, and storage environments. However, when it comes to higher-level views and understandings of how services get consumed, DataBridge makes it easier than ever to assemble your existing infrastructure management data into meaningful information. Continue reading →

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Increase Visibility Into Infrastructure Management With EMC DataBridge

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What if you could create your own view of your data center?

Well, you will soon be able to develop your own custom visualizations with EMC DataBridge which provides a new way of thinking about—and creating—a single-pane of glass.

As covered in a recent post, IT infrastructure management solutions go deep, providing detailed information of only part of your infrastructure to address very specific use cases with varying effectiveness, but that is not how data centers should be run. While these solutions are inter-related in what they provide, they often exist as rigid silos of data and functionality within the data center. To truly run IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS), these silos must be broken down and combined to provide better insight into infrastructure resource use, issue identification resolution, metering, resource planning, and more.  

EMC DataBridge is an enterprise management software that enables you to transform how you consume and manage your IT operations data by providing tools you need to combine EMC infrastructure data sources along with non-EMC data sources with business logic from your organization in new, meaningful ways. Continue reading →