EMC Acquires Watch4net To Bolster Data Centre Management

EMC continues to broaden its software capabilities with the acquisition of a data centre information management specialist.

The storage giant on 31 May said it has acquired 12-year-old, Montreal-based Watch4net in an all-cash transaction, with terms of the deal not released.

Management Specialist

Watch4net is a provider of carrier-class performance-management software that provides real-time, historical and projected visibility into the performance of the network, data centres and cloud infrastructures.

The two companies are quite familiar with each other, having been partners for more than seven years. Watch4net’s frontline APG package is already tightly integrated with EMC’s IT Operations Intelligence Suite.

“One of the reasons Watch4net is a good fit for EMC is that we’re focused across domains: across network, compute and storage,” Ken MacDonald, senior director of marketing for EMC’s Information Management Group, told eWEEK. “EMC already has the ability to monitor performance to Watch4net, and then provide the correlation and root-cause analysis and service assurance capabilities that the ITOI suite provides.

“Both products have the ability to reach across the three domains and also across the physical and virtual environments [within the data centre].”

Blind Spots

Here’s an example of what Watch4net provides. Many VMware environments include something called a vSwitch, a virtual switch, “which in some ways becomes a bit of a blind spot for the VM [virtual machine] administrator,” MacDonald said.

“It’s tough for them to really understand if the connections are being maintained within the virtual switch. One of the important features of the ITOI (which includes Watch4net) is the ability to monitor the virtual switch and include that as part of our correlation and root-cause analysis capabilities,” MacDonald said.

Watch4net CEO Michel Foix and most of his 70-person team will be retained and will report to Jay Mastaj, senior vice president and general manager of EMC’s Infrastructure Management Group.

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