48% of Respondents Chose EMC as Their Brand of Networked Storage for Virtual Servers

EMC Corporation has been cited as "the most prevalent storage vendor in their overall environments" according to a survey of 124 global IT decision-makers currently using x86 server virtualization technology. The January 2009 report titled Storage Choices For Virtual Server Environments also revealed that 98 percent of the 124 survey respondents were using VMware ESX in their virtual server environments, and that 78 percent have virtual server technology in use for production application workloads.

According to the survey 48 percent of respondents chose EMC as their brand of networked storage for virtual servers – nearly two times more prominent than the next closest storage provider. The next closest vendor was used by only 25 percent of survey respondents. Additionally, 63 percent of the respondents prefer to buy from a single storage vendor which illustrates that buyers show a preference for working with a single storage vendor.

“Which vendor(s) supplied the networked (SAN or NAS) storage used environment?”
(multiple responses accepted)

Base: 124 global IT decision-makers currently using x86 server virtualization
(Source: September 2008 Global Virtual Server Environments Online Survey)

"Customers are moving to virtualized environments to support their most critical workloads and are choosing EMC networked storage for their virtual information infrastructure," said Frank Hauck, EMC Executive Vice President, Global Marketing and Customer Satisfaction. "EMC has invested in extensive integration, interoperability, joint engineering, and solution validation across EMC’s portfolio to enhance the capability of all of our products to support VMware, and enable our customers to realize greater business and operational value from their EMC and VMware Infrastructure environments."

"To achieve many of the benefits of server virtualization, such as the flexibility to move virtual machines between physical hosts for workload balancing and high availability, physical hosts must be networked to shared storage," wrote Andrew Reichman, Senior Analyst, Forrester in the report. "While heterogeneity is a complicated reality for many storage environments, 63% respondents indicate that they have purchased storage for virtual server environments from only one vendor…According to the respondents of this survey, EMC is the most prevalent storage vendor in their overall environments …"

Key product integrations that enable EMC’s customers
to unlock more value from their information infrastructure
and virtualized environment include:

• Storage resource management that integrates with VMware’s vCenter Server and ESX server APIs to unify management environments using EMC ControlCenter
• VMware vClient Server-integrated dependency and root cause analysis with EMC Smarts, advanced data de-duplication backup and recovery optimized for VMware using EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker and EMC Data Protection Advisor
• Business continuity data protection enabled by the industry’s most comprehensive support of Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vCenter Server integrated array snapshots with Replication Manager
• EMC Symmetrix or EMC CLARiiON QoS software with VMware DRS to deliver end-to-end quality of service for VMware environments.

In January 2009 EMC became a gold-level VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) to help enterprise customers around the world accelerate the business benefits they can realize by virtualizing their information infrastructures and data centers.