EMC delivers ultimate flexibility in virtualized storage for Middle East's SMBs

"SMBs in the MENA region have increasingly become more sophisticated, and EMC's customers are looking for storage solutions that are reliable, simple to deploy and, most important, make their lives easier," said Mohammed Amin, General Manager, EMC Middle East & North Africa.

"The EMC CLARiiON AX4 solution empowers growing companies with the necessary tools to act like storage specialists and to do so with minimal effort and expense. Now, EMC's smaller and mid-sized customers in the region have a fully-functional storage system that is affordable, has the most important software built-in and can be easily managed and scale to meet their future business needs as their information requirements grow."

The new EMC CLARiiON AX4 networked storage system can scale to 60 terabytes of capacity and supports either iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) connectivity. With built-in advanced information management and protection features, it can store, manage, secure and protect data from up to 64 high availability Windows, Linux, Unix, NetWare and VMware Infrastructure hosts simultaneously. The CLARiiON AX4 system is cost-effective to deploy and can easily be tailored and expanded to meet dynamic information storage requirements and is ideally suited for applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Oracle and SAP. It can be configured with up to 60 SAS and SATA disk drives for an optimal mix of performance, cost and energy efficiency.

The CLARiiON AX4 system was specifically designed to integrate with and extend key VMware Infrastructure capabilities, many of which require shared storage. Built-in features enable real-time volume expansion - making the allocation of high performance storage for new virtual machines simple and seamless. The CLARiiON AX4 also includes EMC's Virtual LUN technology, which can be used in conjunction with VMware Storage VMotion, a new product introduced with the recent major upgrade to VMware Infrastructure, for the non-disruptive migration of multiple virtual machine disk files.

In addition, the CLARiiON AX4 supports EMC's leading replication software, including EMC MirrorView, EMC SAN Copy, EMC RepliStor and EMC Replication Manager to provide the highest levels of uptime in VMware environments. The CLARiiON AX4 has been certified by VMware and included in the VMware Storage / SAN Compatibility Guide.

"Companies, especially SMBs, are constantly looking for ways to simplify their IT environments and get the most value from their storage investments," said Charles King, Principal Analyst, Pund-IT, Inc. "That's one of the key reasons why iSCSI is becoming so popular, and is especially important in VMware environments where new virtual servers require consolidated storage. EMC's CLARiiON AX4 is ideal for SMB's virtualized environments since it includes key features that make it easy for businesses with few or no dedicated IT resources to set-up, manage and allocate networked storage. With the CLARiiON AX4, EMC is providing customers plenty of storage options at an attractive price point."

With an easy-to-use, intuitive interface, terabytes of SAN capacity can be configured with minimal effort and with just a few mouse clicks by following simple, graphical interface instructions and installation wizards. System management is also intuitive and simplified by using the latest version of EMC Navisphere® Express, which uses a graphical approach to creating and managing disk pools and virtual disks, enabling storage capacity to be created, allocated and re-allocated in seconds, while the application remains online. This builds on EMC's commitment to delivering storage systems that are easy to use, manage and deploy.

The CLARiiON AX4 includes features for high availability and reliability that are not typically found in competitive systems of this size. The CLARiiON AX4 was specifically designed for SMBs and is built on the same architecture used in larger, market-leading EMC CLARiiON CX3 midrange storage arrays which have achieved coveted "Five 9s" availability - 99.999% of uptime. It features a mirrored cache design, built-in standby power supply, continuous disk consistency checking and hot swappable components which provide superior levels of data availability and reliability.

EMC E-Lab Testing and Qualification Helps EMC Partners and Resellers

The new CLARiiON AX4 system will be offered by EMC's worldwide network of distributors, resellers and channel partners. It will also be offered by Dell and NEC under their own brands. It has been extensively tested for interoperability with a wide range of host operating systems, HBAs and SAN infrastructure and clustering components in EMC's E-Lab™, which provides the most comprehensive interoperability testing in the industry.

"We are delighted that EMC are using its Channel as the main route to market for this product in EMEA. The CLARiiON AX4 represents a great opportunity for Magirus and its Resellers. The CLARiiON AX4 is well positioned to meet many of the demands we are seeing in the EMEA IT marketplace. It is competitively priced, easy to install and easy to use, yet has many enterprise-like features. The scalable upgrade path to 60TB and VMware compatibility is perfect for customers with growing and more demanding business-critical environments" said Christian Magirus, Chief Operating Officer, Magirus AG.

"We are committed to continually evolving our Channel Strategy and will shortly announce the latest set of Velocity Partner Program enhancements to help our Partners differentiate their business model and therefore bring additional value to their customers. We are also introducing a set of products which are exclusively available through our Velocity Partners. The CLARiiON AX4 is the first offering which has been specifically designed for the mid-market and will only be sold through our Velocity Partners in EMEA," said Willem Hendrickx, EMEA Vice President Channel and Mid-Market, EMC.