As customers continue their march toward ever-simplified IT infrastructure, lower costs and increased business agility, EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) and VMware (NYSE:VMW) today at VMworld ®2013 announced a major investment and commitment focused on rapid advancement of software-defined storage architectures and emerging models for the way applications consume storage in virtualized environments.
Initial offerings emerging from this software-defined storage collaboration will focus on the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) and small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) markets. In these markets it is common for customers to use vSphere ®singularly across a broad set of workloads, making the simplicity and tight integration of VMware Virtual SAN™ with VMware vCenter ™Server compelling. The efforts will focus on joint research and development projects, the creation of joint EMC and VMware proven solutions, and joint test and validation labs.
Offerings emerging from the collaboration are targeted to span a multitude of customer use cases for implementing software-defined storage in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), test/dev and disaster recovery environments . Each targeted use case will be optimized for deployment on VMware Virtual SAN infrastructure, supported by storage policy-based management and featuring significantly reduced TCO through the use of low-cost server-side storage.
To ensure tight integration and execution, EMC and VMware have initiated and are building out geographically distributed development labs focused on product definition, compatibility testing, and the optimization of EMC, VMware and third-party technologies.
EMC, as a leading information infrastructure provider for VMware solutions, provides customers running VMware software with the availability, protection, and security needed to virtualize and gain competitive advantage while making it easier for customers to adopt cloud computing and virtualization technologies to run VMware software in next-generation cloud infrastructures with increasing levels of automation.