HOPKINTON, Mass., Dec. 10 -- EMC Corp., the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today further expanded its comprehensive portfolio of virtualization technologies with the introduction of the newest version of EMC Invista for storage area network (SAN) virtualization. The additional capabilities in Invista make it even easier for customers to simplify and automate the management of their information, minimize downtime, lower costs and receive maximum utilization of their entire infrastructure -- from storage to servers to files.

Invista is an enterprise-class, network-based storage virtualization solution for non-disruptive operations. It combines EMC application software and hardware with intelligent SAN switch hardware from Brocade and Cisco. Coupled with EMC's offering for file virtualization -- EMC Rainfinity -- the company continues to strengthen and offer the broadest portfolio of storage virtualization products on the market today.

The new version of Invista includes a number of key additions -- including higher availability for improved data protection, expanded scalability for stronger performance and enhanced management for better utilization -- that help customers keep their infrastructures up and running through both planned and unplanned events. In addition, EMC Invista has now been tested, optimized and certified for use with VMware ESX Server 3.0.2, giving customers the ability to better manage, share and protect the growing amounts of information in VMware Infrastructure environments.

Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, has a system-wide enrollment of more than 69,000 students and nearly 19,000 staff members. With 7,400 courses in more than 500 undergraduate majors and specializations, the Purdue IT staff faced the traditional challenges of constant information growth driven by business and administrative staff, research academics and both graduate and undergraduate students. In addition, user requirements had evolved to include around the clock application access and the IT staff was faced with ongoing maintenance and lease rollovers that impacted availability of their storage infrastructure.

Michael Rubesch, director of infrastructure for Purdue's Office of Information Technology, said, "Purdue is one of the nation's leading research institutions and has a worldwide reputation for excellent and affordable education. Our information infrastructure needs to keep up with the growth and availability demands that are required to serve our students, faculty, and staff. Using EMC Invista, applications can now support our users' requests for continuous availability, including large Oracle databases, course management software, distance learning programs and VMware Infrastructure. In addition, no downtime is required for upgrades or maintenance as all storage hosts are being virtualized with Invista. We have virtualized our new EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 arrays and are taking advantage of Invista as we migrate from our existing EMC Symmetrix DMX-2. It will extend the life and value of our DMX-3s by allowing us to manage storage allocations more efficiently and maximize the use of the available storage."

EMC Invista Certification for VMware Infrastructure Environments

The latest version of EMC Invista has been tested, optimized and certified for use with VMware ESX Server 3.0.2. The combination of VMware Infrastructure and Invista offers customers substantial flexibility in how they deploy, manage, and protect information -- regardless of the server or storage platform within their infrastructure -- helping to lower costs by maximizing the use of all of their assets.

Bryan Byun, VMware vice president of global partners and solutions, said, "VMware and EMC are committed to helping customers maximize their investments and simplify the management of their virtual infrastructures. EMC Invista integration with VMware Infrastructure helps to deliver the benefits of 'flat IT,' where a customer's significant changes can be coherently managed and handled online without disruption to servers, networks or storage. As organizations continue to make rapid developments in IT and rely heavily on enterprise information systems, it's now more important to reduce the amount of infrastructure complexity. VMware Infrastructure provides customers with assurances of interoperability and enables them to easily tap into other applications and software in a virtual environment and remove resource limits, improve utilization and simplify infrastructure management."

New Invista Functionality

The latest enhancements to EMC Invista include:

• Increased availability -- EMC Invista has enhanced its architecture for high availability. Continuous operations are now facilitated through the new distributed control path cluster (CPC). This enables the nodes of the CPC to be separated and supported by campus distances, allowing Invista to continue operating in the event of localized failures.

• Expanded scalability -- With capacity doubling the number of virtual volumes and storage elements, plus a five-times increase in the number of simultaneous mobility sessions, Invista customers can perform larger scope projects much more quickly than before. In addition, coupled with traditional front-end load balancing, Invista now uniquely improves a customer's performance and throughput by offering back-end load balancing.

• Improved management -- Invista's new heterogeneous pooling and mirroring functionality gives customers maximum flexibility to take advantage of tiered storage. Customers can now create storage pools, which they can define in tiers. Customers can then map their most critical applications to their best- performing tier-1 storage, while tier-2 storage can be tasked with supporting development and non- critical applications. Mirrored copies can also now be placed across different tiers. Both of these functions enable greater utilization across all virtualized storage assets.

• Interoperability support -- Adding to Invista's extensive interoperability matrix, the product now provides support for IBM DS4000 series arrays, HP PVLinks and SUN MPxIO path management software is also included, giving customers additional flexibility in their virtualization deployments.

• EMC RecoverPoint integration -- Available since October 2006, RecoverPoint integration with Invista provides heterogeneous virtual to physical -- and virtual to virtual -- replication support, enabling IT managers to employ virtualization technologies across multiple sites for disaster tolerance and enhanced availability.

Doc D'Errico, EMC vice president and general manager of the Infrastructure Software Group, said, "EMC believes in delivering the right storage tool for the right job. When it comes to the non-disruptive movement of data across heterogeneous arrays with the ability to virtualize from the server through to the storage, Invista is the right solution. Not only does it reduce the stress on the infrastructure, it helps those customers that are continuing to consolidate servers and storage reduce the actual footprint of their datacenter, freeing up and allocating a range of resources for other critical needs. The newest version of Invista will also dramatically help those customers improve the central access and management of information through our unique way of non-disruptively migrating data."

About EMC

EMC Corp. 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.

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Source: EMC Corp.