EMC Centeras Can Now Be Aggregated

EMC Corporation announced powerful new virtualization and aggregation capabilities for its EMC Centera family of content addressed storage (CAS) systems. The new Centera Virtual Archive allows customers to federate multiple Centera systems to create a single, highly scalable digital archive. Most significantly, the Centera Virtual Archive simplifies management of archives at scale and distance, delivering significant operating efficiencies.

EMC Centera Virtual Archive, available immediately,
provides a number of benefits:

• Enables multiple Centera systems to be aggregated together into a single, tamper-proof, virtual archive addressable by one or many applications.
• Enables new capacity and processing power to be added beyond the existing boundaries of a single Centera system or a single data center.
• Enables multiple Centera systems at distributed sites to be aggregated into a single management domain (subject to network bandwidth limitations).
• Enables flexible allocation and reallocation of distributed archive capacity to meet changing requirements.

Key Facts:

• EMC Centera systems and the Centera Virtual Archive are designed to help customers meet their most demanding data retention, compliance and disposition policies at the lowest possible lifecycle cost.
• Centera pioneered the concept of CAS – tightly integrated archive functionality with simplified management – and continues to lead the category.
• Today, EMC Centera systems are used by more than 5,500 customers for their most critical archiving applications – medical images, financial statements, call records – anywhere authenticity and governance must be assured over the lifetime of the data.

Charles King, president and principal analyst of Pund-IT, Inc., said: "Companies around the world are facing challenges with managing information that lives throughout their organizations. Making archived information quickly and easily accessible while securely safeguarding it puts a significant strain both on IT infrastructures and budgets. By aggregating capacity and managing information distributed across multiple Centera systems and locations, EMC’s new Centera Virtual Archive can help organizations simplify critical archive processes without increasing complexity or cost."

Mal Griffin, Chief Information Officer for British Columbia’s Interior Health authority, said: "Interior Health has made significant investments in electronic health records and PACS technology to help our staff deliver better and faster care to our patients. Our EMC Centera systems are a key part of the infrastructure which supports a wide geographic area and the new Centera Virtual Archive capabilities will allow us to maximize our storage investment, ensure seamless migrations between data centers and also plan for future information growth as the healthcare landscape continues to evolve."

John Bantelman, Chief Executive Officer, Clearpace, said: "The integration of EMC Centera with Clearpace’s NParchive benefits joint customers who are deploying application archiving or retirement initiatives by unlocking the value in relational data from any database or log file, while lowering costs and making it easier to manage and share this information. That ease of sharing and managing information has become even easier today with EMC’s introduction of Centera Virtual Archive. Having been part of EMC’s Early Access program for Centera Virtual Archive, we see the technology providing new ways to aggregate information and will allow our customers to realize incremental business value from their archived information."

Bobby Moulton, Seven Ten Software, Inc.‘s President, said: "As customers look to reduce operational expense from their IT infrastructure, Seven10’s StorFirst solution with EMC Centera helps curb costs, increase efficiency and get a better grasp on information archiving. Now with Centera Virtual Archive, the StorFirst solution can write or retrieve information from multiple Centera-based archives as if they were one. This will further simplify information management as we work with EMC to provide the highest level of protection for customers who have deployed or are ready to install EMC Centera."

Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the EMC Unified Storage Division, said: "The new Centera Virtual Archive gives customers the ability to easily federate existing archive capacity, seamlessly add new archive capacity, and even aggregate archives over geographic distance – all without adding significant management overhead or cost. Centera remains the archive platform of choice for customers who have the most demanding needs for operational efficiency and governance at scale."

Availability:
EMC Centera Virtual Archive will be available on December 10, 2009 from EMC and its Velocity2 and authorized partners.