EMC Corporation announced it has been named the #1 storage solution in Wikibon's annual virtualization study: “VMware Dominant in Multi-Hypervisor Data Centers.” Wikibon, a leading market industry analyst firm performed a research study analyzing vendor integration with VMware environments. EMC storage systems rated the highest in each of the three categories -- general, block-only and file-only storage.

EMC VNX and EMC VMAX are the leading storage systems in the block-only category among the thirteen products featured in the study, with the VNX named as the #1 storage solution for VMware vSphere in the 2013 research, as well as the 2012 and 2011 reports.
The study ranks storage vendors based on integration with VMware technology . EMC, as a leading information infrastructure provider for VMware solutions, provides customers running VMware with the availability, protection, automation, and security needed to virtualize and gain competitive advantage mak ing it easier for customers to adopt cloud and virtualization technologies to run VMware systems in next-generation cloud infrastructures with increasing levels of automation.

Through the tight integrations with VMware, EMC relieves customers of the need to maintain complex scripting between environments, allowing IT resources to be better manage d and align ed around business requirements and policies and, thereby, reducing costs and improving operational efficiencies.

Leveraging Technology – New Integrations

Customers rated the available offerings of the top storage vendors based on criteria such as data protection, storage performance, management, storage network support and security. Integrations with VMware technology was the survey's most often cited differentiating factor and most sought after storage attribution for vSphere 5.1 implementations.

As proof of EMC's deepened integration with VMware is the EMC Storage Analytics Suite 2.0 (ESA). Customers can now leverage ESA across the VNX and VMAX families to monitor and troubleshoot their environments. Built upon VMware vCenter Operations Manager, ESA extends analytics into the storage domain providing storage and virtualization administrators increased visibility into their systems designed to enable increased efficiency and improved overall productivity. ESA as a stand-alone analytics solution is engineered to provide in depth storage analytics and end-to-end topology mapping on supported VMAX and VNX arrays in a VMware environment.

In addition, the EMC ViPR software defined storage platform provides several areas of integration with VMware including integration with VMware vCenter Orchestrator and VMware vCloud Automation Center to automate policy-based storage provisioning. ViPR leverages technologies with VMware APIs for vSphere Storage Awareness to enable a single interface that centrally manages storage profiles and views ViPR storage pools within vCenter. ViPR integrations with VMware vCenter Operations provide a single dashboard view of storage health and expand the integration with the EMC Storage Resource Management (SRM) suite. These integrations reinforce the openness of ViPR which is currently scheduled to become generally available in the second half of 2013.

Additionally, RSA Security Analytics interoperability with VMware's virtualized networking platform enables security administrators to see all packet data in the virtual data center and specifically VM to VM traffic on a given host. Combining visibility into VM traffic traversing both the physical and virtual networks helps eliminate critical blind spots for security monitoring so that security teams can respond quickly when infected or suspicious virtual machines are detected.

Designed to enable IT transformation , EMC's new hybrid cloud automation services i ntegrat e with VMware operations and management technologies to enable customers to deliver ITaaS.

The new services help IT organizations reduce costs and gain greater agility across the software defined data center. The vCloud Suite Enablement Service leverages VMware vCloud Suite and Puppet Labs PaaS technology to transform how applications are designed and deployed. EMC Management and Orchestration Jumpstart is designed to transform how infrastructure is configured, maintained and scaled through vCloud Automation Center with a vCenter Operations Management dashboard. Additionally, the Dynamic Financial Management Service empowers users, developers, and administrators with financial transparency and control via VMware's IT Business Management Suite.

Customer Quotes:

Blake W. Smith, Director of Enterprise Operations at Christus Health
"The performance  of our VMware environment is absolutely critical to our business.  Since deploying vSphere in an EMC VMAX storage environment, we've seen a major improvement in our overall performance and agility in serving the business.  Our VMware and VMAX storage environment has improved our efficiency as well—and we have the confidence that our information is on the world's most trusted, powerful and smart enterprise storage arrays. EMC has enabled us to quickly and cost-effectively respond to business needs in less-than 20% of the time required using traditional methods."  

Renato Nodarse , IT Director , Citrus Health Network
"EMC's tight integration with VMware is epic - and at Citrus Health Network we've definitely seen the associated benefits within our vSphere 5.1 and VMware View deployments. With simplified management, protected data and enhanced performance we're able to see savings in storage costs as well as improvements in performance and scalability by deploying vSphere 5.1 and View which makes EMC our #1 choice for VMware." 

Mike DiBenedetto, Manager of Global IT Infrastructure, Sekisui Diagnostics, LLC
"Recently our infrastructure capacity doubled while the number of requests from users and developers increased by 50%. Yet , even as we grow, the timeline to fulfill IT requests has dropped from a week down to one or two days.  With the tight integration between VNX and VMware, we're far more agile and responsive to the business. We are able to provision virtual machines in minutes for example.”

Labhesh Potdar , IT Manager , Vision-Sciences, Inc .
The availability of our VMware environment is absolutely critical to our business.  Since deploying vSphere, along with our EMC storage environment, we've seen a major difference in our overall performance and have increased our business agility.  Simplified management and integration into VMware has increased our productivity by almost 20%.  Together, VMware and EMC enable us to efficiently and cost effectively manage our information. 

Industry Analyst Quote:

David Floyer, CTO and Co-founder, Wikibon
“EMC's deep commitment in developing integrations for VMware environments has translated into strong customer adoption. In Wikibon's third annual storage integration study EMC has maintained the highest scores due in part to their focus and investment to provide support for vSphere 5.1's new APIs. Customers are increasing adoption of virtualization across mission critical applications and EMC has stepped up to meet these requirements. EMC's investment in providing support for vSphere 5.1 and their close collaboration with VMware have earned them their position as a clear leader .”

Executive Quote

John Roese, Chief Technology Officer, EMC Corporation
“Addressing the IT complexities our customers face head on requires tight VMware integration with their Software Defined Data Center. Our customers expect EMC to lead and support innovation. This study affirms that customers can continue to count on EMC to deliver the world-class solutions they can rely upon to lead their IT transformation.”