EMC‘s (NYSE: EMC) five-year plan to build its IT data centre management portfolio culminated this week with the launch of its Ionix family of products, which brings all its management offerings together under one integrated family for improved interoperability.
EMC is bringing together a host of offerings together and integrating them under the Ionix umbrella, including products acquired through acquisition and developed organically, including Smarts, nLayers, Voyence, Infra, ControlCenter and Configuresoft.
Ionix represents a culmination of EMC’s strategy and brings together one unified family that offers customers one management experience across both physical and virtual environments, whether its networks, servers, storage or applications said Jon Siegal, director of product marketing for EMC Ionix.
“We’ve assembled a solution set that is very strong in its management capabilities across physical and virtual environments,” said Siegal. “It’s not just about unifying names, but unifying our products to help them solve their critical management challenges in virtual data centres.”
In addition to the re-branding, Siegal said the product line has also been refreshed to enable greater integration, which he added is particularly important given the ways virtualization is changing the face of the modern data centre.
“We were reaching an inflection point where we needed new management tools to solve the new data centre challenges,” said Siegal. “Going from physical to virtualization to the cloud adds savings, but also complexity. Virtualization is breaking many of the management tools out there; it requires new tools and processes and a large dose of automation.”
Virtualization adoption could stall, he said, if IT managers aren’t confident enough on their management tools to rely on virtualized environments for their mission-critical applications.
With the Ionix rebranding and refresh, Siegal said the goal is to give IT managers that confidence, and to break down the silos by giving them one common management experience.
The new family is broken down into four categories: EMC Ionox for Service Delivery and Mapping, EMC Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, EMC Ionix for Data Centre Automation and Compliance and EMC Ionix for Service Management.
For the channel, Siegal said the product integration and the unified Ionix branding will open new doors by making it easier to help clients see the whole range of EMC’s management offerings as a holistic solution.
“We’ve laser-focused this solution-set on the critical virtualization challenges and channel partners will be well positioned to help their customers on this journey,” said Siegal. “Ionix really simplifies the discussion for our channel partners.”
