New version of EMC’s Invista including Interoperability With VMware

EMC Corporation has 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(R) 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.

The newest version of EMC Invista – version 2.0 – is
immediately available from EMC. Version 2.1 – which includes
heterogeneous mirroring and storage pooling – will be available in
December 2007. Invista support for VMware ESX Server 3.0.2 is expected
to be posted to the VMware SAN Compatibility Guide before the end of
the year.

 

EMC Corporation