Roundup: EMC, Riverbed, Dell

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

EMC: Mozy shifted to VMWare & Acquisition, Greenplum advances.On Monday, EMC company VMware announced that they were hired and acquired the assets behind EMC's Mozy cloud-based data protection service. With over a million users, 70,000 business customers and around 70 petabytes of data this will ramp up the cloud offering for VMware and give them new scale and capabilities in what they offer to customers and public cloud partners. EMC also announced this week that it has acquired NetWitness Corporation, a privately held provider of network security analysis solutions.  Operating as a core element of of EMC's RSA division, NetWitness will offer a monitoring and analysis platform to address such issues as insider threats, zero-day exploits and targeted malware, advanced persistent threats, fraud, espionage, data leakage, and continuous monitoring of critical security controls. On Tuesday EMC announced three new additions to its EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (DCA) line of products - the High Capacity DCA, the High Performance DCA and the Data Integration Accelerator.  The EMC DCA line of purpose-built, scalable data warehousing appliances integrate database, computing, storage and network into an enterprise-class, easy-to-implement system. “The declining cost of infrastructure combined with vast rivers of information presents incredible opportunities for leaders," said Bill Cook, President and General Manager of the Data Computing Division at EMC. "But in order to reap the value of this data, organizations need a comprehensive platform that enables advanced analytics and unified data access. The EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance is that platform. It can help those leaders get exponentially more value from their information,”

Riverbed adds ecosystem partners.  Riverbed Technology (RVBD) announced an expansion of its ecosystem for the Riverbed Whitewater family of cloud storage accelerator products.  New partner additions for Riverbed include Nirvanix, EMC NetWorker, Quest vRanger and CA ARCserv Backup.  Whitewater connects directly to existing backup tools and cloud service provider application programming interfaces (APIs).  It securely accelerates backup and recovery operations, deduplicates and compresses data to reduce storage costs in the cloud and installs quickly without requiring changes to the existing backup infrastructure.  “Working closely with Riverbed enables Nirvanix to further simplify storage management for organizations and securely enable faster access to data in the cloud in a cost-efficient manner,” said Scott Genereux, President and CEO at Nirvanix. “When Whitewater and the Nirvanix SDN are deployed together, customers can strengthen and advance their data protection solutions while complying with the most stringent data retention policies. Customers no longer need to be concerned about the performance, complexity, manageability or costs associated with off-site tape storage.”

Dell enhances PowerEdge systems with Intel E7. Dell introduced refreshed PowerEdge systems with substantially increased performance, integrated security and resiliency to tackle the toughest computing environments while easing the migration from proprietary UNIX deployments. The latest editions to the PowerEdge lineup include the 4U rack-mount R910, a four-socket blade server M910, and a 2U high-density R810. “The increased capacity and performance of these systems enable users to do more at an economical price. The ability to tackle some of the higher-end workloads in the data center will entice IT managers to consider wider adoption of x86 within their environment," said Jed Scaramella, research manager for IDC's Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends. Performance gains touted on the new PowerEdge servers include a 38 percent improvement in Oracle application server and database performance using the R910, an 18:1 server consolidation ratio over four socket dual core processor based systems, and up to 93 percent lower operation costs resulting in a one year return on investment. Dell is also providing customers with a wide range of RISC migration services including workshops, readiness assessment, design, transition and implementation.