New EMC Center of Excellence in Durham, NC

EMC Corporation announced its new 450,000 square foot Center of Excellence (COE) in Durham, North Carolina, which will deliver on and demonstrate the promise of cloud computing and IT as a Service (ITaaS) for EMC and its customers.

In addition to housing a virtualized cloud data center that supports EMC’s more than 50,000 employees around the globe, the COE includes 130,000 square feet of global research and development labs and will be a technology showcase to help EMC customers accelerate their own cloud computing and IT transformations.

EMC’s facility in Durham is the latest facility in the company’s global network of COEs, which are located in India, China, Egypt, Israel, Ireland, and Russia. The Centers of Excellence perform services for EMC business units, including engineering and research and development, customer service, translation services, IT and technical support, and customer executive briefings.

New Data Center Accelerates
EMC’s Own Journey to Cloud Computing  
Like many organizations, EMC was faced with unrelenting information growth; inefficient IT infrastructure utilization; increasingly complex application environments; and congested, energy-exhausting data centers. In response, in 2004, EMC’s IT organization began moving from a physical to a highly-virtualized IT infrastructure and embarking on what would become its multi-year cloud computing strategy to transform how IT is delivered and consumed through ITaaS. To accelerate this transformation, the company built a new, energy-efficient cloud data center in Durham, North Carolina.

The EMC data center provides the foundation required for cloud computing with an architecture that will leverage EMC’s information infrastructure technologies, VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies, and Vblock Infrastructure Platforms from VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel.

Through the EMC IT Proven program, which chronicles and shares IT and cloud computing best practices, the new data center will also serve as a technology showcase for EMC’s customers. The company will hold customer briefings and tours of its new Durham data center to share best practices and demonstrate how EMC, VMware, VCE and other partner technologies can help accelerate their own IT transformations.

Durham Cloud Data Center At-A-Glance:

• Designed to operate as a Tier III data center with N+1 redundancy and redundant pathways for the highest availability supporting mission critical operations.
• Leverages EMC’s portfolio of information infrastructure products including: EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage systems, EMC VPLEX and EMC VNX platforms, EMC Avamar and Data Domain backup and recovery solutions, EMC Greenplum solutions for data warehousing and Big Data analytics, EMC RSA security technologies, EMC Documentum ECM solutions, and Ionix for management and orchestration.
• In addition to hosting applications on a shared, tiered virtual infrastructure, the data center will run on a single version of the VMware vSphere virtualization and cloud infrastructure platform within an x86 enterprise hosting architecture running on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms from VCE. About 350 applications and 6PB of data will be hosted at the center.
• Incorporates sustainability and energy efficiency, including a rooftop water collection system, free air cooling for much of the year, and flywheel technology that eliminates the need for battery storage in the uninterrupted power supply systems.
• Extends EMC’s private cloud to support the company’s global footprint of more than 50,000 users; across 400 corporate offices; in more than 80 countries and federating its cloud across the globe in four continents spanning five data centers.

Charles King, Principal Analyst, Pund-IT, Inc., said: "While building a new data center from the ground can be daunting, it is also offers a company the opportunity to rethink and even reinvent how IT will support and deliver solutions to the business. As a leading global technology innovator, EMC has put its money where its mouth is with its new COE and cloud data center. By doing so, the company has opened the doors to harness the agility of cloud computing for its employees. Its efforts should also help EMC customers develop their own virtualization and cloud computing initiatives."

Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC Chief Information Officer and COO, Global Centers of Excellence, said: "We are pleased to extend EMC’s network of COEs around the globe by increasing our IT and RandD presence in North Carolina. Our virtual-first mantra and the latest EMC, VMware and VCE technologies, not only provided the foundation to deliver agility to our more than 50,000 employees, but the COE, data center and our R & D labs enable us to extend and showcase our world-class cloud computing capabilities, solutions and the best practices with our customers."