Why, exactly, would a storage company like EMC suddenly branch out into the tricky world of server management and analytics? According to this article in internetnews.com, it's all about gaining a foothold in change, configuration and compliance management.

The company unveiled two new products this week, Server Configuration Manager and Configuration Analytics Manager. The pair is designed to provide automated discovery and tracking of configuration and configuration changes to help enterprises overcome configuration errors and maintain consistency as individual systems are altered.

EMC VP and product manager Bob Quillan says the idea is to extend the company's storage and network management expertise into the server farm. Management systems have to work together these days in order to provide a full image of the data center, so EMC apparently felt it was at a competitive disadvantage without a unified management stack.

EMC has gathered managment tools and knowledge from a series of acquisitions over the past few years, including analytics from Smarts, network configuration from Voyence, and database management from Infradesk.