EMC Corp.has expanded its portfolio of virtualization technologies with the introduction of the newest version of EMC Invista for storage area network (SAN) virtualization.

Making the announcement earlier this month, the company noted that the additional capabilities in Invista make it even easier for customers to simplify and automate the management of their information, minimize downtime, lower costs and receive maximum utilization of their entire infrastructure -- from storage to servers to files.

Invista is an enterprise-class, network-based storage virtualization solution for non-disruptive operations. It combines EMC application software and hardware with intelligent SAN switch hardware from Brocade and Cisco. Coupled with EMC's offering for file virtualization -- EMC Rainfinity -- the company continues to strengthen and offer the broadest portfolio of storage virtualization products on the market today.

The new version of Invista includes a number of key additions -- including higher availability for improved data protection, expanded scalability for stronger performance and enhanced management for better utilization -- that help customers keep their infrastructures up and running through both planned and unplanned events. In addition, EMC Invista has now been tested, optimized and certified for use with VMware ESX Server 3.0.2, giving customers the ability to better manage, share and protect the growing amounts of information in VMware Infrastructure environments.

Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana has a system-wide enrollment of more than 69,000 students and nearly 19,000 staff members. With 7,400 courses in more than 500 undergraduate majors and specializations, the Purdue IT staff faced the traditional challenges of constant information growth driven by business and administrative staff, research academics and both graduate and undergraduate students. In addition, user requirements had evolved to include around the clock application access and the IT staff was faced with ongoing maintenance and lease rollovers that impacted availability of their storage infrastructure.

Michael Rubesch, director of infrastructure for Purdue's Office of Information Technology, said, "Purdue is one of the nation's leading research institutions and has a worldwide reputation for excellent and affordable education. Our information infrastructure needs to keep up with the growth and availability demands that are required to serve our students, faculty, and staff. Using EMC Invista, applications can now support our users' requests for continuous availability, including large Oracle databases, course management software, distance learning programs and VMware Infrastructure. In addition, no downtime is required for upgrades or maintenance as all storage hosts are being virtualized with Invista. We have virtualized our new EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 arrays and are taking advantage of Invista as we migrate from our existing EMC Symmetrix DMX-2. It will extend the life and value of our DMX-3s by allowing us to manage storage allocations more efficiently and maximize the use of the available storage."

The latest version of EMC Invista has been tested, optimized and certified for use with VMware ESX Server 3.0.2. The combination of VMware Infrastructure and Invista offers customers substantial flexibility in how they deploy, manage, and protect information -- regardless of the server or storage platform within their infrastructure -- helping to lower costs by maximizing the use of all of their assets.

Bryan Byun, VMware Vice President of Global Partners and Solutions, said, "VMware and EMC are committed to helping customers maximize their investments and simplify the management of their virtual infrastructures. EMC Invista integration with VMware Infrastructure helps to deliver the benefits of 'flat IT,' where a customer's significant changes can be coherently managed and handled online without disruption to servers, networks or storage. As organizations continue to make rapid developments in IT and rely heavily on enterprise information systems, it's now more important to reduce the amount of infrastructure complexity. VMware Infrastructure provides customers with assurances of interoperability and enables them to easily tap into other applications and software in a virtual environment and remove resource limits, improve utilization and simplify infrastructure management."