HOPKINTON, Mass., Jan. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

News Summary:

EMC^® today announced:

• New EMC VSPEX™ Proven Infrastructure configurations for virtualized SharePoint environments accelerate deployment and adoption.
• VSPEX is based on best-of-breed storage, virtualization, server and network technology. ­­
• When used with EMC's award-winning unified storage and backup and recovery technologies in a virtualized SharePoint environment, VSPEX can help customers tune SharePoint storage performance in 80% less time, shorten SharePoint provisioning by 4X, and reduce time to manage backup by 81%.
• According to the latest end-user study from IDC¹, more SharePoint was deployed on EMC storage than any other technology vendor.
• EMC also announced updates for all 14 of the original VSPEX configurations to ensure customers can choose from the latest technology when deploying their VSPEX, as well as an online education and sales enablement center and simplified technical documentation for partners.

Full Story:

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced new EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure configurations optimized for virtualized Microsoft SharePoint environments. VSPEX provides customers the power to choose the hypervisor, server, and network technology they prefer to go along with EMC's award-winning VNX^® and VNXe^® unified storage and EMC Data Domain^®, EMC Avamar^® and EMC NetWorker^® backup and recovery solutions to address the uniqueness of their SharePoint environments. The simple, efficient and flexible VSPEX for SharePoint configuration can scale from 1,000 users up to 10,000 users and can be used with all of the private cloud solutions in the VSPEX catalog. Since its April 2012 launch, EMC partners have sold hundreds of VSPEX, which offer a wide variety of configurations enabling channel partners to accommodate a diverse range of customer deployment preferences. Today EMC also announced updates for all 14 of the original VSPEX configurations to ensure customers can choose from the latest technology when deploying their VSPEX, as well as an online education and sales enablement center and simplified technical documentation for partners.

Organizations implement SharePoint to improve internal and external productivity and collaboration. For many customers, SharePoint is often deployed in a highly distributed model that can result in significant data growth, management complexity and isolated islands of information and infrastructure. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint environments enables customers to confidently consolidate or deploy new SharePoint environments and leverage the power of virtualization to lower costs and simplify management.  VSPEX includes EMC's award-winning unified storage systems, which according to IDC¹ are most preferred by SharePoint customers over other vendors.

Available in early 2013 exclusively through partners in the EMC Velocity™ partner program, the new EMC VSPEX for SharePoint simplifies infrastructure design and deployment so partners can focus on rapidly consolidating existing or deploying new SharePoint environments for their customers. VSPEX enables EMC and Microsoft's mutual customers to take advantage of the power of SharePoint so they can more quickly respond to business and competitive requirements.

VSPEX in Virtualized SharePoint Environments: Efficient, Easy to Manage, Powerful

VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint is designed for customers looking to consolidate storage and infrastructure and lower costs associated with SharePoint use cases such as Document Repository (file shares replacement) and Enterprise Content Management. With VSPEX, customers can realize greater efficiency, flexibility, higher availability, faster and simplified backup and recovery and reduce TCO. VSPEX provides Microsoft customers and others a choice of industry leading virtualization technologies for their private cloud Infrastructures.

EMC unified storage solutions deliver predictable performance and significantly reduce the planning, sizing and configuration burdens of adopting a private cloud environment. EMC backup and recovery solutions leverage industry-leading deduplication technologies to significantly reduce backup storage requirements and enable fast, reliable data protection.

Validated in tests and studies conducted by EMC and leading industry analyst firms, these technologies combined in VSPEX can help users in virtualized SharePoint environments:

• tune SharePoint storage performance in 80% less time
• shorten SharePoint provisioning by 4X with EMC Storage Integrator (ESI)
• accelerate SQL Server transactions per second by 4X
• cut time to manage backup by 81%
• reduce backup storage by 10-30X

EMC Extends VSPEX Value for Customers and Partners with Enhanced Solutions, New Enablement Center, and Simplified Technical Documentation

• New Technical Integration – To ensure customers can choose from the latest technology when deploying their VSPEX EMC announced today that the original VSPEX Private Cloud and End User Computing solutions are now updated with VMware vSphere 5.1, Windows Server 2012, EMC FAST™ Cache, EMC FAST VP, and specific to the VSPEX End User Computing solutions, RSA SecurID^®  two-factor authentication. Click here for a complete list of the latest VSPEX offerings.
• New Online VSPEX Enablement Center for Partners – EMC Velocity partners can now easily access information about becoming a VSPEX-enabled partner. Current VSPEX-enabled partners can use the enablement center to help identify the best solution to address customer challenges, as well other resources to support their VSPEX sales and development efforts such as reference architectures, solution overviews, training, vLabs, and instructional videos.
• Simplified VSPEX Technical Documentation – Technical documentation for the VSPEX Private Cloud and VSPEX End User Computing solutions are now delivered as a single document – The VSPEX reference architecture, sizing guide and deployment guide are now a single document that can be accessed on EMC Community Network here.

Customer Quote:

Nigel Farr, Client Services Director, Equiniti ICS

"Consolidating and virtualizing SharePoint and other mission-critical applications on an EMC VNX unified storage solution has helped Equiniti ICS deliver our hosted services customers improved performance, agility, reduced costs, increased data protection, and rapid recovery.  EMC's ability to address our quality of services requirements has also enabled us to provide these customers with a confident solution that's simple and efficient.  Solutions like VSPEX will make our future deployments easier."

Reseller Quote:

Tony Jimenez, President & CEO, MicroTech

"SharePoint is a mission-critical application that our customers rely on for many things, such as sharing ideas and expertise so they can make the right decisions for their business. All of this collaboration results in data that needs to be managed, secure, and highly-available in the cloud. Our customers like VSPEX because it's simple, efficient, and it gives them the flexibility they need for their unique IT requirements. Another added benefit is that the customer can rely on their value-added reseller to configure a customized, complete VSPEX solution that can be deployed in no time. We believe VSPEX will gain significant momentum in virtualized SharePoint environments because it's based on EMC unified storage and backup and recovery technologies that can help them significantly reduce backup storage and tune and provision SharePoint in less time."

EMC Quote:

Jeremy Burton, Executive Vice President, Product Operations and Marketing, EMC Corporation

"EMC VSPEX is a simple, efficient, and flexible reference architecture optimized for the most popular use cases for customers moving to cloud computing. Virtualized SharePoint has become a mission-critical application and therefore needs to be managed and protected – the new EMC VSPEX for SharePoint enables customers to accelerate their IT transformation with faster deployments, simplified management, backup, and storage provisioning while decreasing data volume, lowering the cost and complexity of management as well as data security and governance risk."

Additional Resources:

• Read about EMC Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint
• Join the VSPEX conversation on EMC Community Network
• Learn more about VSPEX
• EMC Everything Microsoft Community
• Learn more about partnering with EMC
• Learn more about Microsoft at www.microsoft.com
• Follow @EMCVSPEX on Twitter
• Join the #EMCChannel conversations on Twitter.
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com

¹ IDC, "IDC's Storage Users Demand Survey 2011 - Fall Edition: Customers Still Want Choice, #234651

EMC, Avamar, Data Domain, FAST, NetWorker, RSA, SecureID, Velocity, VNX, VNXe and VSPEX are either registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under the Federal Securities Laws.  Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (v) component and product quality and availability; (vi) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (viii) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (ix) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xii) threats and other disruptions to our secure data centers or networks; (xiii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (xiv) war or acts of terrorism; and (xv) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

SOURCE EMC Corporation