EMC CEO Joe Tucci Underscores Strategic Benefits to MENA Customers as He Unveils the Unprecedented Virtual Data Center Storage
New Energy-Efficient Symmetrix V-Max Storage System is World's Fastest High-End Array
Dubai, UAE. - April 15, 2009 - Joe Tucci, Chairman and CEO, EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, unveiled today during his visit to the Middle East a breakthrough new approach to high-end data storage with an innovative new architecture purpose-built to support virtual data centers. Tucci also announced the first storage system based on this architecture, which will serve as a cornerstone of virtual computing infrastructures that are transforming the technology landscape.
"The shift from physical to virtual computing is being driven by efficiency gains too compelling to ignore," said Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman and CEO. "Virtualization's ability to maximize resources and automate complex and repetitive manual tasks is overtaking the server world and is now happening to the storage world. EMC anticipates that some of the world's first virtual data centers will be built here in the Middle East region, where there is still growing demand for virtualization solutions."
"EMC -- which has been serving customers in the Middle East for more than 10 years -- is leading the way with the biggest breakthrough in new high-end storage design in nearly two decades, enabling storage customers across the region to deploy a flexible, dynamic, energy-efficient information infrastructure and get the maximum value for their investment."
During a discussion with journalists and customers in the Middle East, Tucci revealed that EMC's Symmetrix systems have been an unprecedented success in the region, with more than 50% of the region's leading financial institutions and more than 70% of telecoms operators relying on these EMC solutions to store and manage customer data reliably and cost-effectively.
"Having EMC's chairman and CEO in the region on the day of such an important and strategic announcement of our new virtual architecture and showcasing the value of virtual data centers for some of EMC's leading customers in the Middle East emphasizes EMC's commitment to bring value to the constantly expanding region. The business benefits that this new technology will provide is testament to the strategic nature of how EMC is making storage simpler, better performing, and more energy and cost-efficient," said Mohammed Amin, regional manager, Middle East, North West Africa & Turkey, EMC.
The analyst community shares EMC's enthusiasm for virtualization and its benefits. Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., said, "Server virtualization has caught fire, and there is no turning back. To realize the ultimate benefit, however, the whole infrastructure stack has to be virtualized and integrated. EMC's new Virtual Matrix Architecture provides all the missing ingredients required for the virtual data center at the high-end storage layer - infinite effective scale in all dimensions, a single system image to manage and dynamic self-optimization."
The new EMC® Virtual Matrix Architecture™ integrates industry-standard components with unique EMC Symmetrix® capabilities to deliver massive scalability - enabling systems that scale to hundreds of thousands of terabytes of storage and tens of millions of IOPS (input/output per second) supporting hundreds of thousands of VMware and other virtual machines in a single federated storage infrastructure. It is the first storage architecture that combines the performance and efficiency of a scale-up architecture and the cost-effective flexibility of a scale-out architecture. It was designed and built from the ground up to break the physical boundaries of data center storage, incorporates automation to simplify storage management, enables resources to be scaled on demand and uses less energy per terabyte of data stored than traditional high-end storage systems.
Full details about the new architecture and new systems are available at www.overtakethefuture.com.
The first storage system based on this innovative new architecture is the EMC Symmetrix V-Max™ system, which is available immediately. It is the world's largest high-end storage array and uses multi-core processors to lower power costs and improve IOPS per dollar. Combined with the latest generation Enterprise Flash, Fibre Channel and SATA drives, the Symmetrix V-Max system allows users to cost effectively meet the widest range of storage requirements for high performance and high capacity in a single system. It joins the market-leading EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 system and expands EMC's high-end portfolio. Together they represent the two newest high-end storage architectures on the market today.
The high-availability Symmetrix V-Max Engine at the center of the new system is a flexible building block that features multiple redundant Intel® Xeon® Quad-core processors with up to 128 GB (gigabytes) of memory and up to 16 host and 16 drive channel connections. The Virtual Matrix Architecture allows Symmetrix V-Max Engines to interconnect and share resources. This enables a Symmetrix V-Max system to scale to 1024 GB (gigabytes) of global memory, with twice as many front-end and back-end connections compared to the industry-leading Symmetrix DMX-4 systems. The ability to interconnect and share resources to easily and linearly scale out is a key customer requirement as virtual machines and applications are dynamically added and shifted.
The Symmetrix V-Max system provides more than three times the performance, twice the connectivity and three times more usable capacity than the current market-leading Symmetrix DMX-4 systems and uses significantly less power per terabyte and per IOP. As part of EMC's Early Adopter Program, more than 30 of the new systems have already been shipped to customers with some of the world's largest data centers, including EMC's own state-of-the-art production data center.
New Automated Management Tools
In virtualized environments there are significant benefits to consistent and rapid provisioning of storage to multiple physical servers and server clusters. The Symmetrix V-Max system automates storage provisioning, reducing the time and complexity of provisioning by 95 percent. Integration with numerous VMware features enables both server and storage resources to be provisioned on demand, with centralized management, reporting and control. In addition, EMC ControlCenter® support for both the Symmetrix V-Max storage system and VMware will increase visibility and automate reporting across the virtual server and storage environments.
In tiered storage environments, Symmetrix V-Max systems enable data to be non-disruptively relocated to different storage tiers and RAID protections, including ultra- high performing Enterprise Flash Drives, traditional Fibre Channel disk drives and high-capacity SATA disk drives based on business requirements. The Virtual Matrix Architecture allows customers to relocate more data in less time and with less impact to overall performance than any competitor, while also maintaining local and remote replication activities to ensure continuous protection for today's "24 by forever" data centers.
EMC also announced Fully Automated Storage Tiering ("FAST"), its innovative automation technology. Leveraging the Virtual Matrix Architecture's unprecedented data relocation capabilities, FAST will automate the movement of data across multiple storage tiers based upon business policies, predictive models and real-time access patterns. This will further accelerate the adoption of Enterprise Flash Drives by enabling customers to more effectively leverage Flash performance together with the cost-effective capacities of SATA hard drives for improved return on investment and lower total cost of ownership. This new technology will be available on Symmetrix V-Max systems later this year.
Industry Leading CEOs on the Virtualized Data Center
John Chambers, chairman and CEO for Cisco, said, "Cisco and EMC share a vision of next-generation data center solutions that allow our customers to unleash the full power of virtualization and transform the traditional data center. There is a market transition occurring within the data center, and EMC's new approach to high-end storage virtualization complements Cisco's Unified Computing architecture, enabling customers to increase productivity, improve business agility and take the benefits of virtualization to a whole new level."
Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, said, "Companies of all sizes began on a path toward virtualization for the immediate cost savings from using servers more efficiently. Through this journey, customers also found that their datacenters became more flexible as infrastructure elements are pooled and available on demand. The new Symmetrix V-Max System in combination with VMware's upcoming vSphere generation of products currently in development will extend this value by yielding customers not just CapEx savings but OpEx savings through increased efficiency, control and choice."
Paul Otellini, Intel president and chief executive officer, said, "Intel and EMC have a long history of partnership. This announcement takes us to the next level with a deep collaboration in enabling the dynamic virtualized datacenter. The move by EMC to Intel Xeon processors is a significant step in delivering on this joint vision."
Michael Klayko, CEO of Brocade, said, "We envision an evolution toward a fully virtualized data center that offers tighter coordination among computing, storage and network elements than is available today. Our relationship and work with EMC is part of our differentiated strategy for best-in-class data center networking solutions. Brocade's support of EMC's new class of enterprise-class storage platforms extends the two companies' long history of joint development and building solutions for enterprise data center infrastructures."
The New Symmetrix V-Max Tiered Storage System
The first new Symmetrix model based on the Virtual Matrix Architecture is the Symmetrix V-Max system, the world's largest high-end storage array, featuring:
- Up to 128 Intel Xeon processor cores
- Up to 1 TB (terabyte) of global memory
- Fibre Channel/FICON/Gigabit Ethernet/iSCSI connectivity
- Latest generation Flash/Fibre Channel/SATA drive support
- Scale to 2,400 drives
- Maximum usable, protected capacity of 2 PBs (petabytes)
David Donatelli, President of the EMC Storage Division, said, "This is a new approach to storage in terms of both architecture and a new product. Customers moving to virtualized data centers need a storage architecture with flexibility for the future, one that uses less power, costs less with improved functionality and gives them the ability to scale and manage more information without adding resources. We've made significant investments over the past several years to develop the Virtual Matrix Architecture with these customer requirements in mind, and the result is another industry breakthrough for EMC."
New Zero Data-Loss Asynchronous Replication
EMC pioneered remote replication for the highest levels of information protection with its SRDF® (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) software in 1994, and it remains the most innovative solution of its kind, used in large-scale mission-critical environments worldwide. EMC is introducing the new zero-data-loss SRDF Extended Distance Protection (EDP) feature for Symmetrix V-Max systems, which can reduce the cost of multi-site replication by up to 50 percent. SRDF is ideal for virtual server environments and has been integrated with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and supports EMC Replication Manager for automated protection of VMware environments.
Accelerated Data Migrations for Improved Efficiency and Agility
To help customers take advantage of the full capabilities of the new Virtual Matrix Architecture, EMC Global Services introduced a new EMC Migration Suite of tools and services to accelerate migration processes and execute migrations to the new architecture up to 50 percent faster and more efficiently. The EMC Migration Suite leverages comprehensive and unique best practices and EMC E-Lab™ interoperability testing to minimize risk, time and complexity.
EMC Proven Solutions for Major Data Center Applications
The unique features of the Symmetrix V-Max systems provide customers with new efficient ways to address the needs of their most critical data center applications, including those from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. EMC has an initial set of EMC Proven Solutions that help accelerate implementation of VMware, Microsoft, and Oracle applications with Symmetrix V-Max systems, with additional solutions under development. These documented best-practices and services from industry experts take advantage of the full capabilities of the new Virtual Matrix Architecture to maximize resources at the lowest possible cost.
Innovative Financing Options
EMC Global Financial Services offers innovative financing options for Symmetrix V-Max systems that can help customers further lower their total cost of ownership. Click here for additional information about EMC financing options.
EMC Partners on EMC Symmetrix V-Max Systems:
Patrick P. Gelsinger, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group at Intel, said, "Intel and EMC are collaborating on a number of fronts to enable the dynamic virtualized datacenter. With industry leading energy efficient performance and virtualization technology, the Intel® Xeon® processor family enables the Symmetrix V-Max storage system to deliver transformational scalability for the most demanding virtual datacenter."
Ralf Lindenlaub, senior director, SAP NetWeaver Platform Services, SAP AG, said, "SAP and EMC share a vision for making business processes seamless and flexible.Our companies have worked closely for more than a decade to address some of the most pressing data center challenges facing our enterprise customers. The new Symmetrix systems, as part of our Center of Excellence environment, will enable us to work together to demonstrate customer proof of concepts, facilitate joint engineering work, and allow our mutual partners to run scalable SAP benchmarks in some of the areas of most interest to customers, including enterprise flash drives."
Availability
The Symmetrix V-Max system is generally available today.
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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, Symmetrix, SRDF, Virtual Matrix Architecture, Symmetrix V-Max, EMC ControlCenter and E-Lab are either registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used 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) the impact of any expense reduction initiatives; 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 2009
