EMC Extends Leadership in VMware Integration, Announces Broadest Support for New VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite

HOPKINTON, Mass., July 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

News Summary:

• With the industry's broadest support for the new VMware vSphere® 5 and cloud infrastructure suite – through more than 75 points of integration - EMC leverages new storage, backup, and security features of VMware vSphere to deliver even more value to customers and accelerate their journey to the cloud.  
• End-to-end support of VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 across EMC's replication portfolio provides simplified disaster recovery – coupled with the unique in the market ability to display virtual machine-level replication information through platform-level VM-awareness reduces risk for virtualizing mission critical applications.
• EMC provides optimized backup and recovery for cloud infrastructures with EMC Avamar® and EMC NetWorker support for VMware vSphere 5, and introduces new support for VMware vCloud Director 1.5 with Avamar.
• New EMC Global Services and education offerings help customers more quickly deploy and maximize benefits of the new VMware cloud infrastructure suite and cloud computing.
• Collaboration between VMware and RSA results in the VMware vShield™ App with Data Security capability – increasing trust in the cloud by adding Data Loss Prevention capabilities to vShield Trust Zones.

Full Story:

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), today announced full technology support, services and the industry's most comprehensive integration with the new VMware cloud infrastructure suite including VMware vSphere 5, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5, and VMware vCloud® Director 1.5 at general availability. This pervasive and immediate support further validates EMC as the industry-leading storage vendor* in VMware virtual and cloud environments and highlights EMC's commitment to its shared vision with VMware to help accelerate customers' journey to the cloud and extend their technology investments.  Customers will be able to more easily and quickly enjoy the availability, ease of management, performance, security, and cost-reduction benefits of virtualization in their mission-critical application environments.  RSA, the security division of EMC, today also announced collaboration with VMware vShield 5 to deliver, for the first time, embedded data loss protection (DLP) through VMware vShield Data Security capabilities (see related release).  

Customer Quotes:

"At Expedia, we are leveraging EMC's commitment to being the storage leader in VMware vSphere® virtual environments.  Using EMC technology with VMware vSphere 5, Expedia is realizing increased agility, scalability, and performance through EMC's use of the new VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration with EMC VNX, and improved application availability and scalability with EMC PowerPath/VE data path optimization.  As we strive to be more of an IT-as-a-Service organization through cloud computing, we will look to EMC and VMware to help us achieve our goals," said Travis Gunther, Principal Architect, Expedia.

"CAC (Credit Acceptance Corporation) has seen phenomenal results during our recent installation of VMware vSphere® 5 with EMC storage platforms, including increased storage utilization through the new VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration.  With more than 80 percent of our tier one applications virtualized such as Oracle and Microsoft SharePoint server, we have seen measurable performance increases in our environment.  For example after virtualizing our Data Warehouse on VMware vSphere 5, we've seen that jobs are up to 28% faster than they were when they were on their former physical hosts – and early testing with vSphere 5.0 shows that we're able to get even more out of the same hardware," said Mike Hurst, Senior System's Analyst, Credit Acceptance Corporation.

EMC Extends Value and Enhances Performance of VMware vSphere 5

Customers looking to virtualize their mission-critical applications have two main concerns: performance and cost.  As the number one storage provider for VMware environments, EMC announced the broadest day-one support of VMware vSphere 5 across EMC VNX™, EMC VMAX™, and EMC Isilon® storage platforms to efficiently and effectively scale with the VMware cloud infrastructure suite to support thousands of virtual machines (VM).  Through support of four new VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration, EMC increases its close-knit integration points with the VMware platform- delivering more than 75 points of integration - across storage, backup and security products to offer the most business value, ease-of-use and enhanced performance of VMware environments.  EMC also has broadened VM object-level awareness to include EMC VNX in conjunction with EMC VMAX – the only midrange and enterprise storage systems to offer this native platform capability at no additional cost. Additionally there are new free VMware vCenter plugins for all EMC storage platforms so VMware administrators can manage their VMware vSphere cluster, VMs and storage all from within VMware vCenter's management console.  

Customers utilizing EMC PowerPath®/VE in VMware vSphere 5 will also be able to dramatically reduce the costs of growing virtualized environments ranging to thousands of VMs through PowerPath/VE's ability to automate and optimize data paths to provide high availability and to more easily scale mission-critical applications.  PowerPath/VE has been updated to integrate with the new VMware vSphere 5 auto-deploy capability, and simultaneously simplifies licensing and management.  Additional cost reductions will be attained by leveraging EMC FAST VP (fully automated storage tiering for virtual pools) to augment VMware Storage DRS.  EMC FAST VP lowers costs and improves performance by leveraging dense, high-capacity storage and high-performance SSDs as appropriate, and also provides finer control by extending mobility to sub-VM granularity.  EMC and VMware have collaborated to enhance dynamic mobility of virtual machines over distance in this release using EMC VPLEX™ in conjunction with enhancements to the core VMware vSphere 5 high availability capabilities.

EMC Extends Value of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5

EMC remains the only vendor to support every recovery-point objective, every scale and every price point with full VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 integration to rapidly and efficiently bring virtualized servers and mission-critical applications online at a secondary site – and to recover selected VMs with a single click back to the primary site - delivering more value to mutual customers.  EMC's industry-leading replication software supporting VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 includes EMC SRDF® (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) and EMC RecoverPoint: a cross-platform replication solution integrated with VMware vCenter Server to provide the unique ability to display VM-level replication information in a common management console.  

EMC Global Services has deep expertise in effectively integrating VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager into business continuity environments enables customers to achieve agility, application flexibility, availability, infrastructure efficiency, and security.  EMC's end-to-end solutions methodology applies best practices across business continuity and virtualization disciplines, providing cost-effective recovery strategies for VMware environments.  

EMC Extends Value of VMware vCloud Director 1.5

EMC Avamar® optimizes backup and recovery for enterprise customers and for service providers who need to protect thousands of VMs. Avamar is able to perform backups 90 percent faster and requires 20 times less storage space – all while using 1/20th of the compute and network resources required by other backup solutions.  With added support for VMware vCloud Director, EMC extends this data protection to cloud infrastructures, with recovery at the tenant, VM, and "file within VM" level.

EMC and VMware Collaborate on New Enterprise Application Deployment Model

EMC and VMware have delivered an industry first – a purpose-built virtual container for Tier 1 applications for private cloud implementations.  Designed to support complex enterprise-class implementations, this multi-service hybrid container, VCUBE, provides automation for VMware vSphere 5, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5, VMware vCloud Director 1.5, VMware View and VMware vShield 5 to dramatically speed deployments.  VCUBE represents a new, simplified model for enterprise-class software deployment, available as part of EMC OnDemand.

EMC Global Services Help Customers Accelerate Their Journey To The Cloud

As one of the largest Premier partners in the VMware Partner Network with thousands of VMware-trained professionals, EMC Global Services has a proven track record of completed engagements of VMware solutions in EMC environments.  EMC Global Services delivers strategic consulting on virtualization and cloud advisory services, and engages in the day-to-day planning, design and implementation of VMware environments.  To help customers maximize the benefits of VMware solutions and cloud computing, EMC Global Services also provides educational and certificate programs for Cloud and Data Center Architects – enabling the next generation of IT professionals supporting virtualized data centers.

Analyst Quote:

"Storage integration with the VMware platform is critical because virtualization introduces IO overheads that can stress application performance," said David Vellante, Chief Research Analyst at Wikibon.org.  "Practically speaking, what this means is that better integration simplifies storage management allowing storage administrators to be more effective and efficient at resolving performance issues. Findings from recent Wikibon research show that EMC has the top storage integration functionality in the business. As well, Wikibon users most commonly rated EMC the platform of choice for virtualized storage with more than 50% of survey respondents citing EMC as the best storage provider for VMware environments." 

EMC Executive Quote:

"EMC and VMware have a great partnership built on a massive engineering investment, constant dialog and joint innovation to accelerate customers' journey to the cloud.   This translates to EMC's ability to deliver more value to a our customers by once again providing the most comprehensive day-one support and the most integration points across VMware vSphere® 5, VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5,  VMware vCloud® Director 1.5 and VMware vShield® 5.  The new VMware cloud infrastructure suite combined with EMC technology will help customers virtualize business-critical applications, provide a clear path to both private and public clouds, and bring the highest levels of security to their clouds," said EMC's Chad Sakac, Vice President, VMware Technology Alliance.

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

* According to Customer survey, "Vendor selected as primary VMware storage vendor" (Source: Wikibon Survey April 2011, n=361)

EMC, Avamar, Networker, RSA, VMAX, VNX, Isilon, PowerPath, VPLEX, SRDF and Avamar 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.

VMware, VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter and VMware vCloud are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.  The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under the Federal Securities Laws.  Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (v) component and product quality and availability; (vi) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (viii) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (ix) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xii) threats and other disruptions to our secure data centers or networks; (xiii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (xiv) war or acts of terrorism; and (xv) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

SOURCE EMC Corporation