New EMC® VPLEX™ Frees Information Access and Movement from Constraints of Physical Storage; Key Enabler for the Journey to the Private Cloud

Dubai, UAE. -- May 11, 2010 - EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today unveiled groundbreaking new technology that significantly advances Virtual Storage and will enable dramatic new models of computing.  Virtual Storage is a key component of a private cloud - a simpler, more cost-effective and agile information technology (IT) infrastructure, allowing organizations of all sizes to improve the way IT resources are managed, delivered and consumed.  

New EMC® VPLEX® technology is a radically new and better approach to data access and mobility, changing distance from a barrier that must be overcome to as asset that can be exploited.  It will ultimately allow organizations to non-disruptively move thousands of virtual machines and petabytes of information over thousands of miles, schedule daily batch processes in locations with lower energy costs, easily shift IT operations out of the way of regional disasters, and dynamically balance workloads as the business day progresses around the globe.

EMC VPLEX, combined with other EMC Virtual Storage technologies like FAST (fully automated storage tiering) are transforming storage arrays in the same way server virtualization technology has transformed physical servers - from dedicated single-purpose machines to highly efficient, flexible, aggregated resources shared across multiple operating environments and geographies.  The federation of compute and storage resources together allows entire data centers to be virtualized and managed as a single resource.  This allows organizations to rethink their entire data center strategies, their locations, the number of them and ultimately the role that each plays in the overall IT environment.

A key to Virtual Storage is the federation of distributed storage arrays, which is a breakthrough component of the new VPLEX technology.  Federation transparently pools the resources of multiple storage systems locally and over distance and allows them to work together.  Federated storage is not only more efficient than its physical predecessors; it also allows IT organizations to aggregate separate data centers and service providers into a large virtual data center. 

New EMC VPLEX: Breakthrough technology based on 20 years of leadership

EMC VPLEX represents a major step in the journey to the private cloud and IT as a service.  EMC VPLEX combines scale-out clustering and advanced data caching with unique distributed cache coherence intelligence to allow data to be accessed and shared across hosts and clusters within and across data centers.  EMC's approach to distributed cache coherency is the unique technology that addresses the inherent challenges of latency, bandwidth and consistency that arise when regularly accessing and relocating large amounts of information over distances in real time.

EMC first introduced the performance benefits of integrated cache -  pre-staging the most frequently accessed data into electronic memory for near instant response times - in its first Symmetrix® storage system two decades ago and holds numerous patents in this area. This expertise, combined with acquired intellectual property, and a multi-year development effort, has resulted in a fundamental information storage breakthrough called AccessAnywhere® that is first being delivered in a new product family and will eventually be integrated into other EMC storage solutions.

New EMC VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro: Managing data mobility and access

EMC VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro are the first two products to utilize this new technology. A solution that resides between the servers and heterogeneous storage arrays, each is comprised of high-availability VPLEX Engines that encompass  two separate VPLEX Directors, each featuring high performance multi-core Intel® Xeon® processors,  32GB intelligent cache pools and 8 Gb/s (gigabit per second) Fibre Channel host and array connections.  EMC has qualified the new VPLEX systems with major hosts, clusters, operating systems, hypervisors, storage area network (SAN) infrastructure, and EMC and non-EMC storage systems.

EMC VPLEX Local Features:

  • Non-disruptive, transparent data mobility within, across and between EMC and non-EMC storage platforms within a single site/data center.

  • Simplifies recurring information movement and improves storage utilization.

  • Features a single cluster with up to 4 VPLEX Engines (8 Directors) with support for up to 8,000 virtualized storage volumes.

EMC VPLEX Metro Features:

  • Non-disruptive, transparent data mobility between EMC and non-EMC platforms.

  • Ability to link two separate VPLEX clusters within a data center or up to 100 km apart and to federate some or all of the storage volumes across both clusters, effectively presenting these "stretched" volumes at each site as if they were local, shared volumes.

  • Able to synchronously relocate and synchronize data I/O, between two sites up to 100km apart (5ms round-trip response time maximum).

  • Ability for any data volume to be configured for simultaneous access by applications in two locations, enabling relocation, sharing and balancing infrastructure resources.

  • Validated EMC Proven reference architecture with VMware and Distance VMotion to transparently move and relocate active virtual machines between ESX clusters over synchronous distance for Microsoft, SAP and Oracle applications.

  • Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Live Migration to transparently move and relocate active Virtual Machines for more dynamic IT operations.

  • Support for Oracle VM 2.2 with Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Linux and Windows guest hosts and EMC PowerPath with the ability to move workloads between servers locally with Live Migration and between locations using VPLEX Metro.

  • Features two clusters with up to 4 VPLEX Engines each and support for up to 16,000 virtualized data volumes.

Future Capabilities: VPLEX Geo and VPLEX Global

Future planned products include VPLEX Geo, which will enable asynchronous federation of VPLEX clusters to support requirements such as data center migrations/consolidation and application relocation over cross-continental distances. Also planned for future delivery is VPLEX Global, which will enable distributed concurrent data access and workload relocations across multiple global locations over both synchronous and asynchronous distances. These products, which will be rolled out beginning in 2011, deliver completely new computing and data center models that provide the foundation to fully enable the private cloud. 

VPLEX Services and Solutions

VPLEX is designed to be customer installable and EMC also offers a range of design, assessment and implementation services.  In addition, EMC has strategic relationships with leading networking, virtualization and application partners to deliver integrated EMC Proven solutions that support customers' industry, business and technical requirements. All solutions are rigor­ously tested and documented with reference architectures and best practices designed to reduce total cost of ownership and ensure a predictable and reliable outcome.

Availability

The EMC VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro systems are available immediately from EMC and can be purchased via standard capacity-based licenses or as a private cloud-based "pay-as-you-go" subscription licensing approach designed specifically for VPLEX.

Customer Quotes

"The great thing about the EMC VPLEX system is that it allows us to start treating our data centers as a virtual data center without being constrained by geographic boundaries.  We can use VPLEX to instantly remap the storage and reroute the data load.  As the load shifts from data center to data center, VPLEX allows us the flexibility to continually keep adjusting our virtual storage platform to meet the load growth. This is a great outcome for us and our customers. I think the real benefits our customers will see from Melbourne IT implementing VPLEX is a range of new products and services in the hosting space that allows us to spread a service across multiple geographic-diverse data centres which is uplifting the availability and disaster recovery capabilities for mission-critical applications."

Glenn Gore, Chief Technology Officer at global IT services provider Melbourne IT

"Our data centers support one of the largest enterprises in Switzerland and our infrastructure is designed to provide our customers and employees with secure, reliable and fast access to information about products, orders and transactions. With the EMC VPLEX system, we're able to better utilize our two data centers and provide a high-availability environment with active/active access to information for our main production systems. In addition, VPLEX gives us the ability to failover and shift storage and computing resources between data centers if needed. As part of a cooperative, we are owned by our customers, and maximum utilization of our IT resources is a major part of ensuring the best return on our IT investments. "

Patrick Mosberger, Head of IT at GMOS, part of the Swiss MIGROS cooperative, the largest retail and grocery chain in Switzerland

"EMC is on its own journey to the private cloud with its internal infrastructure and VPLEX is helping us accelerate it.  The improved agility, utilization and availability we're seeing with our SANs as a result is similar to what we experienced with our servers when we implemented VMWare vSphere.   Our installation of VPLEX took less than 4 hours and we were installed, configured and totally operational.  Going forward, the geographic federation capabilities of VPLEX will enable a whole host of optimization strategies that have never before been possible with our data centers around the world."

Jon Peirce, EMC's vice president of Global IT Infrastructure and Services

Industry Analyst Quote

"CIOs increasingly want to extend beyond the four walls of their data centers and bring together as one their assets around the world, and federation is the technology that allows them to do that.  One of the past challenges about leveraging IT resources around the world is that you actually had to forklift, if you like, the data from one geographic area to another.  What VPLEX enables you to do is access this information anywhere.  VPLEX and distributed cache coherency certainly demonstrates innovative leadership in the marketplace for EMC. We're seeing what the private cloud can truly look like with this technology."
Benjamin Woo, Vice President for Enterprise Storage Systems with IDC

EMC Executive Quotes

"VPLEX is groundbreaking technology and that will change the way data centers are designed and managed.  It's a core component of EMC's Virtual Storage vision and will do to storage what server virtualization has done to computing and will provide game changing levels of efficiency and flexibility.  The ability to share, move and access large amounts of data regardless of location is a key element of the Journey to the Private Cloud.  VPLEX technology will enable to follow the sun computing, the relocating of workloads to low-cost energy regions or moving them out of the way of approaching storms - in general, IT environments will be more dynamic and flexible than ever before."

Patrick Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products

"EMC has more than 20 years of expertise in designing, understanding and perfecting carrier-class distance and caching solutions.  These capabilities and intellectual property have come together as VPLEX.  It is a highly resilient, transparent, scale-out architecture that solves fundamentally hard problems that arise when routinely moving petabytes of data. This is critical technology that will enable the journey to the private cloud."

Brian Gallagher, President EMC Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Group

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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, VPLEX, Symmetrix and V-Max 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.

Forward-Looking Statements

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: adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (iv) 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; (v) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vi) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (vii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (viii) component and product quality and availability; (ix) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) war or acts of terrorism; (xii) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (xiii) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xiv) litigation that we may be involved in; 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.

© Press Release 2010