EMC Delivers Path Management for VMware vSphere 4 Data Centers

EMC Corporation announced new high-availability advancements for next-generation virtual data centers with the new EMC PowerPath/VE software. As one of the first vendors to provide enterprise-level path management, load balancing and fail-over capabilities for VMware vSphere 4, EMC continues to advance the automation of server, storage and path utilization across physical and virtualized server environments. This unique addition to the industry’s most widely used path management solution helps customers simplify data center management, is more cost-effective and less risky than complex manual alternatives and improves application and system performance.

This announcement is part of a broader strategy to integrate EMC’s broad portfolio of information infrastructure technology and solutions within VMware vSphere environments.

The adoption of VMware vSphere 4 will bring tremendous efficiencies for customers but will also drive new data center requirements for high availability of information and applications. As part of the EMC PowerPath family, PowerPath/VE automates and optimizes server, storage and path utilization in a dynamic virtual environment, providing users with predictable and consistent information access. While native multipathing products require constant monitoring and manual rebalancing, PowerPath/VE uniquely and automatically re-balances the I/O (input/output) in VMware vSphere environments to maximize performance and availability.

Computershare, a financial services and technology provider for the global securities industry, is a beta-tester of PowerPath/VE, running more than 1,000 VMware virtual machines with approximately 900 on EMC Symmetrix storage arrays.

Gary Paramore, Global Infrastructure Architect of Computershare, said: "As one of the largest specialized financial services companies, managing more than 100 million shareholder and employee accounts for over 147,000 corporations world wide, it’s more important now than ever to improve data center efficiencies while making sure information is accessible and protected for our clients. With our ‘virtualize-first’ policy at Computershare, it’s paramount for us to ensure we can non-disruptively maintain the proper utilization levels for our servers and storage in our virtual environments. EMC PowerPath/VE is enabling us to intelligently and transparently manage the traffic of these virtual machines while drastically improving our business continuity efforts. The strength of PowerPath/VE is its ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ functionality, which gives us the peace of mind that work-load utilization rates in our VMware environment are running at optimal rates."

PowerPath/VE customers can now take advantage
of these additional benefits:

• Standardization: PowerPath is the only independent solution to unify management of major server, operating system and virtual platforms across physical and virtual environments–including VMware vSphere and Microsoft Server 2008 Hyper-V environments–thereby eliminating the need to monitor and rebalance the dynamic environment. Rather than deploy and support a variety of point products, PowerPath/VE standardizes multipathing across the entire environment.
• Transparent Protection: Through unique integration with VMware vSphere 4’s vStorage technology, customers can now leverage PowerPath/VE in VMware vSphere environments to automatically detect and reroute I/O in the case of a path failure to ensure applications stay online. This delivers a significant leap in availability and performance to every virtual machine in the virtual datacenter – with a smaller footprint and simple deployment model.
• Improved Performance: PowerPath/VE utilizes all available I/O paths to automatically balance high throughput demands, resulting in increased performance with multiple data streams per host. PowerPath/VE dynamically adapts to meet the sustained I/O performance required in EMC Symmetrix V-Max environments with clustered ESX Server hosts and thousands of virtual machines.
• EMC Global Services: Offering end-to-end virtualization services capabilities to help with deploying PowerPath/VE, EMC Global Services helps customers accelerate virtualization adoption with consulting, deployment, managed services and education.

Dave Cote, EMC’s Vice President of Infrastructure Management Software, said: "Virtualization brings a new level of flexibility in managing and allocating data center resources, however automation is required to keep pace with the massive scale of new virtual data centers. While other solutions can only deliver a sliver of the functionality for their own homogeneous environments, EMC PowerPath is the only solution that standardizes path management and load balancing across physical and virtual environments, helping customers receive predictable performance levels, energy efficiencies and cost savings. As customers heavily invest in next generation virtual data centers, EMC will continue to be at the forefront in delivering the appropriate storage solutions and services for their virtual environments."

Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware, said: "Customers need a solution that automatically and intelligently monitors the entire environment to maximize resource utilization and streamlines management of complex, dynamic environments via a single solution. EMC PowerPath/VE provides non-disruptive data availability across a customer’s VMware vSphere 4 environment, and our joint customers will benefit greatly to this heterogeneous path management and load balancing solution."

Robert Murphy, Northeast Division Co-President, of Presidio, an EMC Velocity Partner, said: "With EMC PowerPath/VE, we have a unique opportunity to provide customers with a key solution that adds foundational value for virtual infrastructures. By allowing customers to standardize its utilization management and load balancing across storage and servers, they can now greatly improve efficiency in their ever-growing virtualized environments. We’re happy to work with EMC and deliver solutions that help drive ubiquity between the physical and virtual worlds."