EMC announced it has expanded its solution portfolio for mission critical applications with new proven solutions that simplify the implementation of business continuity, backup, recovery and information protection of Exchange Server and SQL Server running on the VMware platform. Customers have access to fully tested and validated reference architectures and best practices to accelerate time to deployment, deliver predictable results, and achieve improved application-level performance, backup and recovery, remote replication, high availability and manageability.

EMC's expanded solution capabilities address customer requirements for improved business continuity of mission critical applications deployed on VMware infrastructure. EMC solutions and associated best practices enable reduce planned downtime and quicker recovery from unplanned outages as well as the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service. The new solutions capabilities, which are tested and validated for the VMware platform, include expanded tiered storage options including support for the EMC CLARiiON AX4 for cost effective performance and scalability; backup and recovery featuring de-duplication enabled by EMC Avamar; data protection enabled by EMC RecoverPoint across multiple application environments; and increased application availability enabled by VMware VMotion.

"With 600 mailboxes, a little over 500 Exchange users and about 450GB of total data in our Microsoft Exchange environment, it is crucial we have the right backup solutions that have been proven to work in the event of an outage," said John E. C. Davis, Technology Director at Nexsen Pruet. "We chose EMC because of its industry-leading products, expertise and solutions capabilities that address all of the components of our information infrastructure including -- Exchange, VMware and network storage. Utilizing a virtual environment has enabled us to meet the specific requirements we have as a law firm, for ROI, flexibility and availability, while freeing up resources for other critical business."

Additionally, EMC announced the results of joint scalability testing with VMware that enables customers to deploy a large-scale (16,000 users +), virtualized Exchange 2007 environment running on a single VMware ESX host. EMC and VMware also demonstrated expanded recovery capabilities to consolidate, backup and secure a large-scale virtualized Exchange environment using EMC Replication Manager and data security utilizing RSA technologies including RSA SecurID and RSA enVision.

"Our customers are virtualizing more and more Microsoft Exchange Server deployments and transitioning to Exchange 2007 on the VMware platform in order to increase the reliability, scalability and availability of email," said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware. "EMC's new Exchange solutions, with new benchmarks for scalability as well as backup and recovery options, provide customers with rigorously tested reference architectures for applications running in VMware virtualized environments."

"Today's announcement demonstrates EMC's commitment to creating and delivering solutions that deliver predictable accelerated results for our customers that target and address their business requirements," said EMC's Todd Pavone, Vice President, EMC Global Solutions. "We have focused on addressing the pain points of our customers by building repeatable solutions to address these challenges while providing them with peace of mind that their data and information is safe and protected."