EMC expands consulting services

Storage giant EMC has expanded its service offerings through the channel to target global demand for information lifecycle management.

EMC said it had extended its consulting service offerings and consolidated them under one brand, EMC Consulting. "Valued" partners would offer the services globally through expanded practices in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region and Latin America.

Peter Gerr, senior analyst at EMC's enterprise strategy group, said information lifecycle management must be business-centric and account for all critical assets in play.

"Before businesses can manage corporate information assets based on compliance and governance, business continuity and security needs, they must ensure they have assessed how different data types and classes move through their lifecycles," Gerr said.

EMC said its consulting business has completed some 600 customer engagements since it began in 2002.

Customers wanted more help in addressing emerging problems arising from the exponential growth of information volumes and legislation.

EMC Consulting would include classification and policy services. Policy-based information management helped businesses automate their processes, EMC said.

"The services now help customers move data efficiently to various tiers of storage as service requirements for specific information change over the information’s lifecycle," the vendor said. 

EMC's architecture and consolidation services would now include best-practice planning methodology to help customers, for example, consolidate server and storage environments and accomplish data centre relocations.
 
An Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework had been added to EMC's storage management optimisation services. 
 
Also, the vendor's information protection services would provide business continuity strategies, processes and plans, backup, recovery and archive strategy assessments, EMC said.