EMC Cleans Up Exchange Clutter

CHICAGO—EMC Corp. Tuesday launched EMC Express Solution for E-mail, its new policy-management software for small and midsize businesses, at the Storage Decisions conference here. The software is designed to help customers get a stronger hold on Microsoft Exchange environments being tangled by soaring e-mail volumes and shrinking storage capacity.

Available now, EMC Express Solution for E-mail is the first in a series of pre-packaged hardware, software and services offerings aggressively targeting the storage giants channel partners to support the untapped midmarket audience. The product is designed and tested for Exchange environments between 100 and 5,000 seats that consolidate up to two full years of e-mail in a single storage array, said Todd Donaldson, global solutions leader for Microsoft at Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC.

The new Express product is comprised of four components. EMC Legato EmailXtender Archive Edition captures, indexes, and stores e-mails to an Extended Mail Store on Fibre Channel ATA drives in an EMC Clariion midtier array to reduce Exchange database size, provide quicker restores and allow administrators to free up mailbox space while eliminating the need for PST files on desktops.

The new EMC Replication Manage/SE software automates Clariion-based replication management to speed up online backup and recovery times. The software supports Volume Shadow-Copy Services in Exchange 2003, enabling point-in-time Exchange copies without server impact.

EMC will also offer the new Exchange Accelerator Service to help design a best practices and replication design plan for Express customers.

“Were taking ILM to the midmarket,” said Donaldson. “[SMB customers] get boatloads of e-mail just like the big [enterprise] guys do, and they want to be able to do something about it.”

A new configuration wizard for EMC Express Solution for E-mail will allow EMC partners offering the new product, including Dimension Data plc., MTI Technology Corp., Pomeroy IT Solutions Inc., and Sarcom Inc., to select the best e-mail solutions configuration from a database in EMCs Channel Express quotation and ordering system.

The EMC offering will help SMB customers that face potential migration headaches as Microsoft ceases free support for Version 5.5 of Exchange on Dec. 31, according to Greg Prestininzi, area vice president for MTI.

“Exchange 5.5 is going to be an unsupported product,” said Prestininzi in Tusin, Calif. “How do you get from 5.5 to Exchange 2003? If I can archive 70 percent of your message store, then youre only migrating 30 percent [of data] to your database. Thats a much smoother migration.”

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The entire package for EMC Express Solution for E-Mail, including the Clariion box, EMC LegatoEmailXtender Archive Edition, and EMC Replication Manager/SE software, will cost around $120,000 per 1,000 users without any services. For a 5,000 seat deployment, a similar package will be about $370,000, EMC officials said.

Editors Note: This story has been updated to include comments from MTIs Greg Prestininzi.

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