EMC VSPEX drives momentum in Europe, Middle East and Africa

By the end of 2012, 558 EMC authorised Velocity resellers across the region were enabled to sell EMC VSPEX, with more than 1,300 deals closed with customers worldwide.

The simple, efficient and flexible reference infrastructure is based on EMC's award-winning VNX and VNXe unified storage systems and EMC's Data Domain and Avamar next-generation backup products, along with best-of-breed virtualisation, server and network technology from EMC alliance partners Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Intel, Microsoft and VMware.

EMC channels selling and distributing VSPEX have noted a positive response from end-customers, while themselves benefitting from the rapid installation times and cost efficiencies that the solution delivers.

Key implementations by EMC channels include:

• Bull, a major EMC channel operating globally in over 60 countries, recently helped the Amsterdam Trade Bank build a robust disaster recovery solution based on VSPEX embarking Bull's bullion enterprise servers. Using the solution alongside EMC VPLEX, to replicate the bank's data centre 30km outside of its Amsterdam operations, Bull was able to achieve effective duplication with a near zero recovery time objective and a zero recovery point objective, enabling the bank to avoid data loss in the case of disruption to its main data centre. As a prequalified, pretested solution, VSPEX provided Amsterdam Trade Bank with a risk-minimised solution, which took less than one month to implement. Such a rapid deployment cut the costs associated with implementation.

• MTI, a reseller that has worked with EMC for over 15 years, deployed VSPEX for Car Expert. As a part of its operations based in Germany, Car Expert is responsible for reviewing and processing insurance claims made in respect of motor vehicles, amounting to around one million transactions per week. MTI was charged with replacing its legacy infrastructure (which was sub-optimal and lacked sufficient capacity) with a best-of-breed solution. The VSPEX platform it implemented, based on components from EMC, VMware and Cisco, provided this and was responsible for a 10x performance boost. The solution was also much easier to manage for Car Expert, allowing them to spend more time on strategic IT initiatives while redeploying resources to new projects. For MTI, VSPEX has also proved highly beneficial; reducing the time it takes to complete a sales cycle by 70%.

• Avnet Technology Solutions has become the preeminent VSPEX Value Added Distributor for VSPEX in EMEA both in terms of deals registered and deals won. Avnet is also the first EMC authorized distributor in EMEA to offer assembly services for VSPEX. The assembly services element of the VSPEX package allows Avnet to support many of its resellers by delivering pre-built, multi-vendor solutions that include EMC technology. Through its data centre expertise, Avnet will now be able to support its business allies in assembling VSPEX as well as integrating this technology with other data centre components - tailoring solutions for such business allies and their end-customers.

EMC has plans to further develop VSPEX to ensure that it meets both channel and end user demands. Recent updates have seen new configurations for virtualised Microsoft SharePoint environments which can now help end-customers tune SharePoint storage performance in 80% less time, shorten SharePoint provisioning by up to 4x, and reduce time to manage backup by 81%.

Havier Haddad, Channel and Alliances Manager, Turkey, Emerging Africa & Middle East, EMC Corporation said, "VSPEX has been available to resellers for less than a year and we are delighted that it has quickly built up this momentum. VSPEX offers users the most effective and pain-free route to the cloud, while providing our channels with a highly strategic and powerful proposition to take to their customers. We are confident that VSPEX will go from strength to strength throughout 2013, providing businesses with the opportunity to transform their IT into a highly valuable asset."