New EMC innovations redefine IT performance, efficiency

Issued by FCB Redline for EMC Southern Africa
Johannesburg, 15 May 2015

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) has announced major new platforms and enhancements that span the portfolio of EMC XtremIO, EMC VMAX3, VCE, EMC VNX, EMC Data Domain and EMC Data Protection Suite products.

The world is going through unprecedented transformation. By 2020, more than 7 billion people will connect to the Internet using 30 billion devices. With people, businesses and things communicating, transacting and negotiating with each other, a new world of digital business emerges. It promises to disrupt existing business models - even those born of the Internet and e-business eras.

The world is increasingly a community of digital citizens engaging in a global network, always connected with the world's information in the palm of their hand, living smarter, more informed lives. This is resetting the expectations they have of the businesses they deal with. They expect faster more personalised digital experiences, and 24/7 access on all devices. To embrace this disruption and be prepared, organisations need to redefine themselves and adopt a digital mindset.

The challenge this presents for CIOs is twofold. First they must start by driving out cost from existing IT without compromising service levels, while secondly, using those savings to deliver new, transformative applications optimised for the digital world. Today's EMC news is focused on the first challenge. Tomorrow's EMC news will address the second.

EMC dramatically simplifies IT

EMC is introducing major updates to its industry-leading XtremIO all-flash array and the VMAX3 Enterprise Data Service Platform. Both products not only deliver breakthrough performance, automation and data service capabilities, but have been specifically designed to dramatically reduce management overhead, reducing the amount of time required to do common tasks from hours to minutes, or eliminating them altogether.

VCE is announcing a new family of Hyper-Converged RackScale Systems that enable enterprises and service providers to dramatically simplify the deployment of next-generation scale-out mobile, cloud and distributed tier two applications. The VxRack System enables customers to start from dozens of servers and scale to many thousands of servers - tens of petabytes of storage capacity while guaranteeing the highest performance and $/IOPS. Most importantly, VCE brings its proven methodology of pre-engineered factory built infrastructure with single call life cycle support to deliver a massively scaled out Hyper-Converged VxRack with the same unmatched VCE customer experience.

In addition, for those IT organisations looking to software-defined storage to provide agility and flexibility for their development and operational (DevOps) environments, EMC is announcing general availability of the first fully virtualised EMC VNXe software stack (formerly known as Project Liberty).

The EMC vVNX Community Edition software stack is designed to provide customers with the ability to create test and development environments based on VNXe storage without a dedicated storage hardware system, and stand up multiple virtual VNXe instances cost-effectively, using industry standard server hardware. Additionally for the VNX family, EMC is releasing a new VNXe3200 all-flash variant. Sold through EMC's Business Partner Program network, the 3TB VNXe3200 is one of the most affordable unified all-flash arrays on the market, with a starting price of under $25 000.

EMC enables path to hybrid cloud

EMC has optimised its products to deliver cloud capabilities across its portfolio, enabling customers to leverage public, private and hybrid cloud as a low-cost and flexible storage and data protection tier. EMC is extending this further with the launch of EMC CloudBoost and EMC CloudArray software. The new CloudArray software enables tiering to cloud or object storage from the VMAX3 platform, lowering TCO by moving data to lower-cost storage. Whether used for backup and archive, file or secondary data, CloudArray technology ensures rapid accessibility, allowing EMC customers to take full advantage of the cloud's greater scalability, lower costs and reduced maintenance.

With today's updates to the Data Protection Suite, CloudBoost enhancements are also designed to enable EMC Avamar and EMC Networker customers to seamlessly protect data on EMC and third-party cloud services, with the tools they already use.

EMC protects data everywhere

As businesses accelerate their use and development of next-generation, cloud-enabled applications, they have struggled to protect data across what has become the hyper-extended enterprise. As part of its ongoing strategy to protect data wherever it resides, EMC is introducing a variety of new data protection products and product enhancements, including:

* New data domain purpose-built backup appliances and powerful new software that breaks the status quo in data protection, raising the bar for traditional backup solutions.
* Cloud-enablement of the Data Protection Suite with the introduction of CloudBoost software to protect data on EMC and third-party cloud services, and the addition of Office365 protection to Spanning by EMC.
* Data Protection Suite enhancements including universal search and enhancements to EMC RecoverPoint for VMs.
* New Spanning Backup protection by EMC expands "born in the cloud" application data protection to Microsoft Office 365. In addition, Spanning is launching the Spanning Back-up for Good programme to offer non-profit organisations peace of mind while working in the cloud.

EMC executive quote

Servaas Venter, Country Manager, EMC Southern Africa
"Business leaders across every industry are redefining their business models to meet customers online, engage through mobile devices and enable applications that are far more capable, intelligent and accessible. IT must transform, but a large part of their investment is tied up in legacy infrastructure and applications. It's a tale of two worlds and they must coexist. EMC is leading our customers in this transformation by helping them optimise today's data centre so they can achieve efficiencies that lower cost and increase service levels to help ensure highly available, always-on access to applications and data."

EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyse their most valuable asset - information - in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Avamar, CloudArray, CloudBoost, Data Domain, Data Protection Suite, Networker, EMC RecoverPoint, Spanning, VCE, VMAX3, VNX, VNXe, vVNX, VxRack, and XtremIO 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.

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: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (v) component and product quality and availability; (vi) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (viii) 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; (ix) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xii) threats and other disruptions to our secure data centers or networks; (xiii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (xiv) war or acts of terrorism; and (xv) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

Editorial contacts

New EMC innovations redefine IT performance, efficiency

New storage and protection offerings simplify and automate storage, deliver a path to the cloud and provide data protection everywhere.