EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, today introduced EMC Invista^TM, the company's new network storage virtualization solution. Invista is based on innovative new technologies to help customers achieve non-disruptive enterprise operations, eliminate planned downtime and centralize and streamline storage management. The integrated hardware and software solution delivers these benefits through the simple and non-disruptive movement, copying and migration of data across multiple tiers of heterogeneous storage arrays. Invista is a key component of EMC's wide range of offerings to help customers implement their information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies, lower total cost of ownership and drive additional levels of business value from their IT operations.

Network storage virtualization provides for the creation of "virtual volumes" within the storage network, forming a dynamic environment in which physical storage resources can be moved and changed rapidly and non-disruptively. Invista groups distributed physical storage devices into a common logical pool. From that pool, customers can easily provision and manage their disparate information resources.

Built with a highly scalable "out-of-band" architecture, Invista delivers the full value of network storage virtualization with the levels of performance, reliability and integrity required for deployment in enterprise data centers. Invista provides the foundation for customers to take advantage of network storage virtualization today, while serving as a platform to deploy new network storage virtualization capabilities easily and cost effectively.

EMC is the only major vendor to develop a network storage virtualization solution designed to run on intelligent storage area network (SAN) switch platforms from the top three switch vendors. Invista takes advantage of specialized processing power resident in intelligent switches to perform core storage virtualization operations.

Invista enables enterprise customers to preserve all of the native performance and software functionality of the physical storage devices being virtualized. Businesses can opt to virtualize their heterogeneous storage environment while continuing to use array-based replication or other storage software functionality currently running on their storage systems.

Mark Lewis, Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer, EMC Corporation, said, "The beauty of EMC Invista is that it gives customers the flexibility to implement storage virtualization as a transparent process that's additive and complementary to their existing infrastructures, while addressing very specific business needs like non-disruptive operation. Customers will be able to deploy Invista in an EMC, IBM, Hitachi or any other qualified environment, while also taking advantage of valuable software they've already purchased for those storage platforms.

"EMC views network storage virtualization as a key enabling technology to address customer challenges such as the inability to schedule planned downtime, the constraints of inflexible storage infrastructures and the need to simplify management of complex storage environments," Lewis added. "EMC took the necessary time to develop an architecture that's completely open and stateless. For this reason, EMC Invista eliminates the performance limitations and data integrity issues associated with other storage virtualization methods, and is architected to scale to the most complex and demanding enterprise environments."

Michael Goode, Director of Storage Services at Nielsen Media Research said, "EMC Invista has the potential to offer an innovative approach to storage virtualization. By connecting to the existing Fibre Channel SAN fabric, Invista will seamlessly utilize storage from a variety of devices without directly connecting devices to it. This will maximize the environment to eliminate storage islands and transparently utilize leftover storage, while being flexible enough to scale with future business needs. One of the main reasons for looking at Invista is the ability to move data and change the infrastructure transparently to applications and the rest of the IT operation."

Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst, Taneja Group, said, "We believe that the initial delivery of EMC Invista to the marketplace represents a seminal event for storage virtualization and the future of the storage industry. This validates network based virtualization as a technology and should galvanize industry and market momentum around the product category. In our view, EMC has approached storage virtualization in the type of highly operational manner that should resonate with end-users. Invista will help companies minimize planned downtime for heterogeneous storage infrastructure changes and simplify laborious tasks like capacity allocations without forcing radical changes to existing SAN configurations."

Storage administrators today can spend 20-30% of their time on volume- management tasks. By presenting a virtualized volume view across multiple heterogeneous storage devices, Invista enables IT organizations to significantly reduce the amount of time spent on these manual tasks. With centralized network-based volume management in place, Invista customers can reduce the repetitive volume management activities that must occur in the server environment today.

Invista's dynamic volume mobility enables storage administrators to move storage volumes from one location to another -- without application disruption -- for normally disruptive processes such as lease rollovers, technology refreshes, data movement across multi-tiered heterogeneous environments or to respond to rapidly changing performance needs.

Invista's network-based local replication provides additional flexibility and choice. For example, businesses can create additional data copies non-disruptively for backup, data warehousing or other secondary uses. Because the data is replicated via the storage network, it can be copied to and from heterogeneous and tiered storage arrays.

While EMC believes that virtualization will exist throughout the IT infrastructure, architecture is also critical for delivering value to customers. Unlike in-band (appliance or array-based) storage virtualization architectures that introduce significant bottlenecks by performing all of their processing within the data path, Invista is based on an out-of-band approach that places the virtualization intelligence in the storage network to eliminate impact on server or application performance.

Through the use of open APIs (application programming interfaces), Invista insulates customers from storage hardware lock-in and prepares enterprises for the emergence of the Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS) API for network-based applications. Invista also is integrated with EMC ControlCenter^TM, EMC's industry-leading family of storage resource and device management software.

EMC will complete Invista beta testing this quarter, with general availability in the third quarter of 2005 for EMC Connectrix branded switches from Brocade and Cisco. Support for McDATA is expected in early 2006. List price for an Invista configuration capable of virtualizing at least 64 terabytes of storage, including all Invista hardware and software, is $225,000, representing a 30% savings over a comparably configured IBM solution.

Invista implementations will begin first in larger enterprise environments where the need for non-disruptive operation is the greatest. Over time and as industry standards mature, Invista will be available for smaller environments and via EMC's Velocity channel partners.