Introducing EMC DataBridge

While most folks know me as a data protection guy, a few might recall that I was also the senior product manager for some of the “systems monitoring” technologies at Microsoft, including the recently released System Center Operations Manager 2012. So, it’s been a special thrill to take an early look at EMC’s DataBridge Enterprise Monitoring solution, which was announced yesterday at EMC World 2012.

  • When most folks think of EMC, they think of Storage (which is reasonable) – and administrators of EMC storage have long been using EMC ProSphere as their storage monitoring solution of choice.
  • Of course, as a backup guy, I and others can look across EMC Backup Recovery Systems’ portfolio of EMC Data Domain, Avamar and Networker technologies through its Data Protection Advisor (DPA) monitoring tools.
  • It turns out that EMC’s portfolio offers at least 6 appreciable monitoring tools (including its also recently announced EMC AppSync) that a full time administrator of one thing, such as backup or storage, might be happy to live in.

But most IT Pro’s today don’t do just one thing anymore. In addition, business stakeholders are increasingly asking for visibility in the platforms that they rely on (or perhaps even paid for); but those IT Pro centric tools may not be the right views to give them. Similarly, application owners and virtualization managers are also looking for how the underlying systems are doing.

To address all of those needs, EMC will be delivering EMC DataBridge later in 2012.

Essentially, it is a “mashup” platform that gathers data from the EMC tools above, as well as third-party technologies – and then enables you to build dashboards, using customized “widgets” or instrumentation that makes sense for you. With EMC’s deep understanding of enterprise infrastructure across its storage portfolio, some of the most robust initial widgets deal with chargeback, as well as utilization. Over the next several months, I expect that we’ll see more about DataBridge, not only from EMC but also from the partner community that EMC is cultivating. In a perfect world, EMC might only provide the framework and instrumentation widgets and its community would create the modules that create insight into the applications and resources (similar to another monitoring solution that I am familiar with).

In the meantime, check out this whitepaper I wrote on EMC DataBridge — https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-16796

Or watch the video from EMC World 2012:

As always, thanks for reading.

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