EMC Expands Offering Around New Microsoft Platforms

EMC Corporation announced expanded product, engineering support and consulting services for Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Windows 7 – providing customers with greater control, increased efficiency and the ability to react to critical business needs faster.

The new offerings demonstrate EMC’s continued commitment to helping mutual customers optimize Microsoft environments spanning the desktop running Windows 7 to virtualized data centers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, and across key business critical applications, such as Exchange 2010.

Expanded Integrated Engineering support
for Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V
EMC offers a recognized storage platform of choice for virtualized environments. To enable customers to simplify the deployment and management of virtualized Microsoft environments, EMC is expanding its engineering focus on Windows Server 2008 R2. EMC will extend its current Microsoft Research & Development Center presence with incremental engineering resources that focus on driving value, adding integration between EMC storage technologies and Microsoft virtualization capabilities. This investment is in addition to the established resources that EMC has already delivered within its EMC Proven Solutions Labs, Partner engineering resources and E-Lab certification programs.

Continued Storage Leadership in the Microsoft Certification
and Support for Windows Server 2008 R2
EMC continues to be a leader in breadth and depth of Windows Server Catalog solutions, the only industry standard that designates technical compliance with specific functions of Windows Server computing. By deploying EMC information infrastructure technologies that have been tested and validated to comply with Microsoft technical requirements, customers make their IT organization strategic by gaining more control over IT risk and increasing efficiency with enhanced compatibility, reliability, and security. EMC Symmetrix V-Max systems, EMC Symmetrix DMX systems, EMC CLARiiON networked storage systems and EMC Celerra unified storage system – all support Windows Server 2008 R2 with more EMC technologies to follow. EMC Proven Solutions provide reference architectures that are tested and validated on Hyper-V – more testing will be completed in 2010.

Comprehensive Information Governance
for Exchange 2010
The EMC SourceOne family will provide Exchange 2010 customers that demand operational efficiency and compliance with a comprehensive information governance solution for integrated archiving, litigation readiness and eDiscovery. EMC SourceOne is an ideal ‘business archive’ that systematically manages retention periods for compliance purposes and applies single instancing at the time of archiving to improve IT efficiency. Customers can also use EMC SourceOne to help reduce the costs associated with finding, culling, reviewing and placing content on secure legal hold as well as providing valid chain of custody.

Expanded EMC Consulting Services Portfolio
As a 20-time Microsoft Partner of the Year winner with 11 Microsoft competencies, EMC continues to expand its portfolio of expert lead services to help customers accelerate the benefits of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010. These services help customers adapt, transition and optimize both virtual and physical Microsoft environments spanning the desktop running Windows 7 to the data centers running Windows Server R2 – across business dependent applications like Exchange 2010.

EMC Proven Solutions
EMC is also integrating these new Microsoft technologies including Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V in its EMC Proven Solution development process to produce solutions that combine EMC and Microsoft technologies that are tested and documented for a broad set of common customer workloads and uses cases. As a result, customers can adopt these new Microsoft technologies in a predictable and accelerated manner.

According to Mike Fisch, Analyst, the Clipper Group, "Customers expect their data center vendors to help them leverage all the benefits of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, Windows 7, and Exchange Server 2010 across their infrastructure. EMC continues to deliver on their focus of providing more value to mutual customers with its Windows 2008 certified solutions across all of their networked storage platforms, solutions for backup, disaster recovery, resource management, data security, data deduplication, archiving, and virtualization, and EMC Consulting’s expanded Microsoft expertise to bring it all together for an integrated and robust information infrastructure that customers demand."

"Microsoft’s newest technologies expand our virtualization strategy and portfolio across desktops and datacenters and provides the cost savings and holistic management that customers require for more efficient and agile IT operations," said Eric Jewett, director, Windows Server and Tools Services Division, Microsoft Corp. "Our customers tell us that a critical factor in their ability to deliver upon this strategy is the support and expertise of partners. EMC’s deep commitment to supporting the newest Microsoft technologies platform through our close engineering work, solution development, and consultant readiness efforts enables our mutual customers to deploy integrated solutions with confidence."

"EMC is committed to helping customers achieve a more dynamic IT environment by ensuring greater IT efficiency, flexibility and continuity while helping them successfully navigate the rapid transformation that is occurring in the data center," said EMC’s Mike O’Neill, Vice President, Technology Alliances. "EMC is well positioned to assist customers as they adopt these new Microsoft technologies through our leading Microsoft consultancy, storage technology integration across Microsoft’s broad product portfolio and deep experience in information infrastructure for Microsoft environments."