EMC will add VMware to its portfolio of EMC
Proven vendors to help solution providers more easily virtualize their
customers’ data centers and increase efficiency and cost savings.
EMC’s Proven solutions are packages that
incorporate EMC technology with that of
other vendors to help solution providers address customers’ most common
solutions needs, says Todd Pavone, vice president of global solutions at EMC.
VMware is publicly traded subsidiary of EMC.
Currently, Pavone says, EMC has developed
solutions with Microsoft around SharePoint Server, SQL and Exchange, and with
Oracle around its databases, and it is also working on some digital physical
security and surveillance solutions, among others.
“We look at actual customers use cases with products across our portfolio as
well as our partner vendors, then we build and integrate those solutions in our
own data center and test them, break them, fix them and validate them so we
know the ins and outs of how the technology works together,” Pavone says.
This approach allows EMC to deliver to its
solution provider partners best practices around holistic solutions that they
can more easily develop and integrate for customers, he says.
“We do all the heavy lifting of finding out the optimum way to implement these
solutions,” Pavone says. “That saves solution providers and their customers
time and money, since they already know about any kinks or quirks with the
solutions, rather than trying to figure out the best practices on their own.”
Pavone says EMC also can build solutions
as a proof of concept so solution providers and customers can see solutions in
action.
“We can exactly replicate a customer’s use case in our own data centers, and
we spend thousands of hours developing, testing, breaking and fixing those
solutions, so when our partners take them out to customers, they know it’s
going to work,” he says.
In fact, EMC’s newest VMware Proven
solutions got their start as a proof of concept for a large customer, says
Pavone. A customer needed to virtualize its entire remote infrastructure, which
consisted of 500 branches. The customer researched other options and discovered
that it would have to buy the infrastructure pieces from different vendors and
spend an exorbitant amount of time integrating all the different parts. EMC
was able to build, develop and demonstrate a solution based on EMC
and VMware technology that was much simpler and would cut deployment times by
half.
“After this customer win, we quickly realized this was a great solution not
just for our partners with large enterprise clients with remote branch
locations, but also for SMBs and midmarket clients who want to virtualize their
entire infrastructure,” Pavone says.
There are two new EMC Proven VMware
solutions, Pavone explains. EMC Integrated
Infrastructure for VMware is focused on server and storage virtualization and
is ideally suited for midsize companies and remote offices that want a quick
deployment of virtualized infrastructure to minimize operational and management
costs.
Built on the EMC Celerra family of
unified storage systems, the solution also includes EMC
Avamar deduplication software to reduce the size of backup data at the
source. Less data allows companies to increase utilization rates of
storage and bandwidth and lower storage costs.
The second solution, EMC Backup and
Recovery for VMware, leverages virtualization to help customers quickly and
reliably back up their VMware ESX servers with minimal impact on their
business.
The solution combines EMC CLARiiON CX4 storage
systems and Replication Manager and EMC
SnapView software to offload the backup resources from the production VMware
ESX server environment, effectively creating zero backup times. Avamar
deduplication software is also part of the solution. It reduces the size of the
backup within and across virtual machines, dramatically reducing the required
backup window, network bandwidth and backup storage infrastructure.
This is a great opportunity for all EMC
and VMware solution providers, according to Pavone, since the solutions provide
incredible flexibility and are a great fit for customers of all sizes and
across all markets.
He says EMC has been working with its
partner community to get them ready, and believes that the new solutions will
provide a foundation for future virtualization solutions. EMC
is already working with Microsoft to develop solutions for its HyperV platform,
Pavone says.
“We’ll continue to expand our solutions to other application players, and as
we move forward we hope to expand into storage and eventually network
virtualization across our entire stack,” he says.
Virtualization 
