EMC will add VMware to its portfolio of EMC Proven vendors to help solution providers more easily virtualize their customers’ data centres and increase efficiency and cost savings.
EMC’s Proven solutions are solutions 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; with Oracle around its databases and 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 centre 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 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,” he says.
Pavone says EMC also can build solutions as a proof of concept so solution providers and customers can see solutions in action, he says.
“We can exactly replicate a customer’s use case in our own data centres, 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 realised 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 minimise 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 utilisation 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, and reduces the size of the backup within and across virtual machines, dramatically reducing the required backup window, network bandwidth and backup storage infrastructure.
Pavone says this is a great opportunity for all EMC and VMware solution providers, 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.
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