EMC Corporation, the number one choice of customers forinformation infrastructure in VMware virtual and cloud environments according to a recent Wikibon survey,  today introduced the next generation of  EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI)  5.0, a free VMware vCenter plug-in enables IT organizations to achieve simplicity and efficiency in data center operations, and to accelerate their journey to cloud computing. With this version of VSI, EMC is providing the storage industry’s first and only end-to-end integration with VMware vCenter that dramatically simplifies management of virtualized storage with the ability to map virtual machines to storage and to self service storage provisioning across EMC Symmetrix VMAX and EMC VNX families of storage platforms from VMware vCenter with full support for VMware vSphere 5.

“One of the biggest drivers for virtualizing an environment is to gain efficiencies through simplifying the data center.  The EMC Virtual Storage Integrator extends the benefits of both VMware vCenter and EMC’s storage platforms with deep rules-based automation that enables VMware administrators to view and easily manage their virtualized storage and the rest of their virtualized environment from one single screen,” said EMC’s Chad Sakac, vice president, VMware Technology Alliance. “This free plugin and our focus on further innovation for it are proof points to EMC’s commitment to accelerating our customers’ journey to the cloud to gain business agility and competitive advantage.”

EMC has been leading the industry by integrating closely with VMware to increase manageability of virtual and cloud infrastructures. VSI 5.0 delivers efficiency gains from storage management simplicity which translates into freed up resources that can be refocused on other areas to drive business agility. VSI provides a single VMware vCenter integrated management tool for Symmetrix VMAX, Symmetrix VMAXe, VNX, and VNXe storage platforms, covering the needs of the smallest to the largest workloads improving efficiencies of customers along their journey to cloud. EMC’s storage platforms have built-in API integration with VMware vCenter, eliminating the need for any agents or additional software, making EMC the only leading storage vendor to integrate in both directions with VMware technology across the portfolio.

As customers proceed along the journey and start virtualizing more complex mission critical applications, the need for simplicity increases. The tight integration of VSI with VMware vCenter and with VMware vSphere 5 provides the simplicity as well as granular management for customers that enables them to deploy mission critical applications with confidence.

“VMware vCenter plays an important role in simplifying IT management, streamlining operational efficiency and ultimately driving down costs.  IT vendor’s like EMC who is investing in its Virtual Storage Integrator plugin to extend the power of VMware vCenter is signaling it not only understands customers’ needs to be able to have a VMware administrator see, map and provision storage from one single console but also that it intends to protect their investments in EMC platforms,” said Mark Bowker, senior analyst, ESG.

VSI Software Highlights:

* Full support for VMware vSphere 5: VSI supports VMware vSphere, EMC VNX family, and Symmetrix VMAX storage platforms and utilizes VMFS 5 to provision multi-terabyte datastores on the VNX Series and Symmetrix VMAX.
* Provisions in minutes:  Simple and integrated self-service provisioning of storage over Block and File protocols across EMC storage platforms such as Symmetrix VMAX, Symmetrix VMAXe, VNX, VNXe, EMC CLARiiON CX4 and EMC Celerra.
* Unmatched access control: Deep secured control enables delegation of tasks with confidence.  Storage administrators can now granularly control availability of storage platforms and storage pools on those platforms that can be self-provisioned by VMware administrators directly from vCenter – accelerating and simplifying operations.
* Troubleshoot with viewing and mapping: VSI provides deep visibility of the relationships between virtual machines, datastores and array storage objects for customers using VMware and EMC technologies together.   VSI 5.0 enhances this capability using simplified naming, and also by extending the capability to new platforms including the VNXe, Symmetrix VMAXe, and VPLEX storage virtualization technology.
* Improved efficiency: VSI drastically reduces storage needs with virtual machine-level compression, and array-based cloning and virtual provisioning.

TECH TIMES