EMC Ships New Storage Products for Microsoft Deployments

EMC on Nov. 9 announced some new reference architectures, best practices and hardware/software products designed to optimize its storage systems using Microsoft Hyper-V.

The new offerings, which involve increased scalability, consolidation advancements and improved data protection, are designed for EMC Symmetrix and Clariion storage arrays running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center.

New storage packages from EMC include its new Virtual Storage Integrator, which helps IT administrators with management of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environments of all sizes through integration with Clariion and Symmetrix storage systems.

Admins can use the VSI to view, map and migrate virtualized servers and arrays across an information infrastructure in a more efficient manner.

Also, a new integration of RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication with Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) 2010 Service Pack 1 Direct Access enables security admins to better protect user identities, information and infrastructures when remotely accessing physical or virtualized network resources.

This secure access package improves network protection for customers who have migrated to Windows 7 Enterprise, EMC said.

New EMC features, as tested by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lab, are:

• Increased scalability, faster deployment: EMC E-Lab has developed a new virtualized infrastructure around EMC Symmetrix VMAX, Windows Server R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V which has been tested to scale to support 1,024 virtual machines. In addition, the EMC TimeFinder local storage replication service was used to accelerate the deployment of virtual machines by up to 27 times faster than a scenario employing traditional network based methods. This was validated through in-depth testing and analysis by the ESG Lab.
• Advanced consolidation for virtualized Exchange 2010: To address this, EMC, Cisco Systems and Microsoft collaborated to design and build a reference architecture modeled on a virtualized storage area network (SAN) based upon EMC Unified Storage, EMC Virtual Provisioning, Cisco Unified Computing System and Hyper-V. The SAN proved to support more than 32,000 Microsoft Exchange users and consolidated server requirements by a 3-to-1 ratio when compared to non-virtualized environments, ESG said.
• Zero data loss protection for more than 20,000 Exchange users: To help successfully guide Exchange users through this effort, EMC, Brocade, Dell, and Microsoft combined efforts to create a reference architecture based upon a multi-site, virtualized SAN that used EMC storage, Dell servers, Brocade end-to-end network, and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. After deploying the new EMC Replication Enabler for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 storage-based replication, the reference architecture proved that 20,000 Microsoft Exchange users could be protected against data loss.