EMC Expands Midrange Storage Leadership In VMware Environments

HOPKINTON, Mass., Aug. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) , the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today further expanded its midrange storage leadership by unveiling new virtualization-aware features for EMC CLARiiON CX4 networked storage systems. Today EMC continues to extend its lead over other midrange storage offerings with simplified management, higher levels of storage consolidation, and integrated data protection and business continuity for VMware environments with new offerings including:

• Virtualization-aware EMC Navisphere  Manager software
• 10Gb/s iSCSI and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) native UltraFlex(TM) connectivity options
• Data protection and replication capabilities with EMC RecoverPoint and EMC Replication Manager software

These new features are key enablers for customers building private clouds and the 'fully virtualized' information infrastructure.

The management complexities associated with virtual environments are increasing as information continues to double every eighteen months.* The biggest challenge storage administrators face in virtualized environments is finding which virtual machines are consuming which storage resources. EMC is the first storage vendor to address this requirement with native capabilities that automate the management, discovery and reporting of virtual machines so that both storage and server administrators can work together to better manage and report on resource use in virtual and physical environments.

Enhanced and Simplified End-to-End Management of Virtual Server Environments

Virtualization-aware Navisphere Manager simplifies the toughest and most time consuming storage administration tasks by integrating with VMware vCenter APIs and correlating virtual machines and their storage resources -- a first among native storage platform management interfaces. It enables customers to:

• Make common tasks orders of magnitude faster and easier, such as identifying root cause of virtual machine performance problems and optimizing capacity utilization. For instance, the discovery and reporting of VMware environments and mapping to the backend storage of a 10 VMware ESX server environment can go from 200 screens to 2 screens -- a 100X improvement in productivity for both the storage and VMware administrators.
• Automatically discover and maintain relationships between the logical and physical, providing a comprehensive view that enables customers to do in minutes what previously took hours. This capability coupled with EMC Storage Viewer for CLARiiON, a free downloadable VMware vCenter software plug-in give virtual machine and storage administrators a common language when it comes to solving the toughest storage challenges in VMware environments.

Higher Levels of Storage Consolidation for VMware Environments

As the bandwidth requirements of virtualized environments increase, state-of-the-art connectivity becomes paramount. To help VMware customers satisfy these needs, EMC is delivering 10Gb/s iSCSI and 8Gb/s FC UltraFlex connectivity options on CLARiiON CX4 storage systems. With its unique UltraFlex technology, EMC enables customers to:

• Mix 1Gb/s iSCSI, 4Gb/s FC, 8Gb/s FC and 10Gb/s iSCSI in a single system -- and the new ability to upgrade to either 10Gb/s iSCSI or 8Gb/s FC online. EMC is the only storage vendor offering this online upgrade capability for both protocols.
• Ensure "future ready," easy integration of technologies, such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), planned for next year, which complements EMC's current Connectrix FCoE switch solutions.

EMC also increased scalability for VMware environments, enabling customers to attach up to eight-times more virtual machines to a single CLARiiON storage system -- providing unmatched scalability and flexibility. The powerful combination of added bandwidth, ease-of-use, and the ability to support thousands of virtual servers is especially important to VMware customers because it significantly increases efficiencies by driving higher levels of consolidation onto a single array.