New EMC Storage Arrays Systems Software Defined Storage Speed IT Transformation

MILAN, Italy - September 04, 2013 -

Today EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) kicked off a 24-hour, around-the-world live broadcast announcing new products that help give customers the speed they need to lead their IT Transformation. Today's news includes revolutionary technology advances in the EMC VNX line of midrange storage, new capabilities for the world's fastest growing reference architecture – EMC VSPEX, the upcoming general availability of EMC ViPR – a new Software-Defined Storage platform, and finally, a preview of “Project Nile” – which EMC expects to be the world's first commercially-available complete, Web-scale storage infrastructure for the data center.

Collectively these new innovations provide customers and partners with the essential building blocks they need to build Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud environments. EMC President and Chief Operating Officer, David Goulden, had this to say about the impact of EMC's new innovations for the market, customers and partners:

“ Customers are demanding more performance and efficiency from their current data center infrastructure while, at the same time, deploying new architectures for their next generation mobile and Web applications. By fully embracing and exploiting disruptive technologies such as Intel MultiCore, virtualization and flash, EMC is providing customers with the products and solutions they need to help transform their IT department–not only delivering unprecedented levels of performance and efficiency but also providing the agility needed for their business to remain competitive. ”

Today's announcement includes the following highlights:

• The new, highly anticipated range of VNX unified storage systems (VNX5200, VNX5400, VNX5600, VNX5800, VNX7600, VNX8000 and VNX-F), that shatter the definition and economics of midrange storage.  The new VNX raises the bar for application performance, storage efficiency, data protection, data availability and ease-of-use. Through new MCx™ software the new VNX fully unleashes the power of flash, accelerating application and file performance by up-to 4X. The new platform also delivers unprecedented price/performance—one-third the price for the same performance of the previous generation .
• All EMC VSPEX reference architectures are now powered by the new VNX Series—delivering 2X more virtual machines at the same prices, and with a broader spectrum of choice for workloads that matter most. VSPEX is the worlds fastest growing reference architecture with 3,600 shipments adopted by 3,000 customers and 1,500 partners.
• EMC announced that the ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform is planned to be generally available later this month. ViPR is scheduled to include both the ViPR Controller and ViPR Object Data Services. ViPR Object Data Services gives customers the ability to view objects as files, providing file access performance without the latency inherent in current object storage models.
• EMC also offered a technology preview of “Project Nile”, which EMC expects will be the first commercially-available complete, Web-scale storage infrastructure for the data center.
• New EMC XtremSW Cache 2.0 software offers deeper integration with EMC arrays including the new VNX Series—further driving down latency by 65%. The advanced caching software also delivers greater interoperability with VMware vCenter, industry first IBM AIX support and distributed cache coherency for Oracle RAC environments (scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of 2013) as well as increased support for any server flash SSD or PCIe hardware (including EMC XtremSF ™ server flash hardware).
• EMC is celebrating its technology partnership with the Lotus F1 Team by jointly announcing the EMCVNX 5400 Lotus Team F1 Limited Edition arrays in Lotus F1 Team colors.

Partner Quotes

Satinder Sethi, Vice President, Data Center Group, Cisco

“Cisco's vision is to make data centers more application centric – with infrastructure that dynamically and automatically responds to the needs of business-critical applications.  Cisco and EMC have partnered closely to deliver three paths to speed our customers' journey to the cloud:  custom-designed infrastructure, validated reference architectures via EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, and pre-integrated converged infrastructure with VCE Vblock Systems.  Over the past year, Cisco solutions integrated with offerings from EMC and VCE have generated significant momentum with customers and partners.  Today, Cisco and EMC have hundreds of joint channel partners and thousands of joint customers around the world.  Together, Cisco and EMC plan to accelerate this success with our mutual channel partners.  We also believe that EMC's next-generation VNX technology will complement Cisco's Unified Compute and Unified Fabric solutions, helping customers maximize their existing infrastructure and further simplify cloud deployments.”

Raghu Raghuram, Executive Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure and Management, VMware    

“As organizations realize the benefits of the software-defined data center, VMware is continuing to offer customers choice and flexibility. VMware infrastructure with the VNX Series, ViPR and VSPEX Proven Infrastructure enables businesses to speed time-to-value, and provides an opportunity for organizations to be efficient and agile as their requirements grow.”

Additional Resources

• All news today includes related information and content via EMC Pulse Blog
• Visit the Lead with Speed Community on ECN
• Video: New DataCrunchers: Unified Storage Road Race
• Reflections Blog: Click Here
• What is Speed?
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn