EMC Enhances Management of Virtualized Microsoft Applications

HOPKINTON, Mass., May 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announces new solutions, tools and technologies that are integrated with the Microsoft applications and technology.  These offerings help companies of all sizes enhance the management of virtualized Microsoft applications and Windows environments, including virtualized Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server.  EMC is leveraging its extensive knowledge and expertise around cloud computing and Microsoft applications to assess environments and design and document repeatable solutions to help Microsoft customers accelerate their journey to the cloud.  The EMC solutions address both IT efficiency and business agility.  New proactive storage management capabilities for virtualized Microsoft environments add functionality for companies that virtualize their Microsoft applications and help them confidently meet service level agreements (SLA) for  scalability, performance and availability.

"To fully maximize the benefits of virtualizing Microsoft environments and applications and get one step closer to achieving a cloud model for maximum efficiency and business agility, EMC has combined its deep knowledge of Microsoft technologies and virtualization and new EMC product integration with Microsoft System Center to drive simplicity of management," said EMC's Prasad Rampalli, Senior Vice President, Solutions.  "At EMC, we also go further to develop, test and validate EMC Solutions so customers can realize the maximum benefits of an EMC-Microsoft environment."

Enhanced Management of Virtualized Microsoft Environments

New EMC tools leverage familiar Microsoft and EMC storage management tools and consoles to help customers get an end-to-end view of the management of virtualized Microsoft environments.  These new EMC technologies help customers identify bottlenecks and proactively manage them.  Customers can also rapidly deploy large scale virtualized environments that previously required multiple IT actions and resources.  The advantages of these new tools and technologies include:

• Simplified storage provisioning and automatic discovery of physical and virtualized Microsoft servers and SharePoint environments with EMC Storage Integrator.
• Elimination of manual scripting required for complete protection and recovery for applications such as Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint with EMC Replication Manager and EMC VNXe unified storage systems for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).
• New EMC Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) pack for Microsoft System Center provides proactive management to protect customers from running out of storage capacity in their Microsoft virtualized environment. Through integration with Microsoft System Center, administrators are alerted when storage capacity is low and presented an option to move virtual machines to a storage volume with more capacity to prevent an unscheduled outage of the virtual machines.
• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager includes a reporting tool for monitoring EMC storage platforms system health and diagnostics through the Microsoft management dashboards. This provides a single, integrated view of an EMC SAN infrastructure.

Enhanced Management of Virtualized Mission Critical Microsoft Applications

The keys to successfully managing virtualized Microsoft applications are to understand the correlation between business requirements and the IT infrastructure capabilities, and prioritizing the appropriate use of virtualization across the Microsoft application landscape.  EMC Global Services professionals have a deep understanding of different layers in the IT stack, including storage systems, hypervisors, applications and the management infrastructure.  This understanding can help clients successfully assess, deploy and manage virtualized Microsoft applications.  The combination of EMC's application and infrastructure expertise, EMC Proven Solutions and deep portfolio of Microsoft-aware technologies helps customers address SLA requirements for all tiers of a federated virtualized application environment.  Through its strategic alliance with Microsoft and years of customer experience, EMC has a deep understanding on how Microsoft applications are architected and deployed. As a result, EMC can apply the right technology and solutions to provide quantifiable management benefits and increase performance when applications are virtualized. Critical efficiency gains include:

• EMC VNX deployed with FAST Cache delivers incremental benefits over VNX deployed alone including increases in virtualized SQL Server performance up to 300%, enables incremental management of up to 1.6 million Exchange emails without the addition of new hardware, improves SharePoint Search crawl performance by up to 91% and reduces search response time by up to 27%.
• EMC Replication Manager simplifies end-to-end protection and recovery of virtualized applications and can restore a 100 GB SharePoint content database within 6 minutes and as well as automating recovery of SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint.
• EMC Total Protection and EMC Efficiency Software suites for VNX unified storage provide customers a new and simple way to acquire EMC's industry-leading technologies for management and data protection of virtualized Microsoft applications with up to a 25% cost savings over purchasing the software individually.
• EMC VMAX with Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) and Virtual Provisioning optimizes performance and improves capacity utilization in Microsoft environments.  FAST VP optimizes the performance of Microsoft workloads by using the right tier of storage. With Virtual Provisioning, a common pool of storage is shared effectively across multiple applications, improving the capacity utilization in Microsoft environments.  
• EMC VPLEX is unique virtual storage technology that federates data located on multiple storage systems – EMC and non-EMC – allowing the storage resources in multiple data centers to be pooled together and accessed anywhere. When combined with Microsoft virtual servers, it is a critical enabler of private and hybrid cloud computing and the delivery of IT as a flexible, efficient, and resilient service.

"As more customers use Windows Server Hyper-V to virtualize their Microsoft applications, the need for simplified end-to-end management increases.  Microsoft is pleased to partner with EMC to develop storage management tools that are integrated with System Center and let customers take advantage of their existing investment in and knowledge of System Center," said Mike Schutz, Senior Director, Microsoft Windows Server.

EMC will be demoing these new management tools and software suites in its booth #901 at Microsoft Tech Ed May 16-19 in Atlanta, Georgia.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, VNX, EMC Proven, VMAX and VPLEX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries.  All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation