NEWS BRIEFS

San Francisco, CALIF. — EMC Corporation, a world leader in information storage, announced new information sharing, movement and backup software that furthers the strategic role of an EMC E-Infostructure in the success of the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system in the enterprise. EMC joined with the software leader to unveil Microsoft’s new .NET enterprise servers that, combined with EMC storage solutions, allow organizations to efficiently Web-enable their businesses. EMC is also the first member of Microsoft’s new Datacenter Infrastructure Vendor program, designed to provide customers with assurances of joint support and compatibility.

Jim Ewel, Vice President, Windows .NET Server Marketing at Microsoft Corp., said, “The Datacenter Infrastructure Vendor Program enables choice while preserving single source support for our mutual enterprise customers demanding the highest levels of scalability and reliability. We are pleased that EMC, a recognized leader in enterprise class storage solutions, is the first to announce their commitment to work with Microsoft and our Datacenter OEMs to enable this program.”

The new software products, EMC Extractor and EMC ResourcePak for Windows, deliver enhanced functionality, increased access to data, and the seamless integration necessary as Windows 2000 scales up to enterprise environments. EMC’s storage systems and software provide customers with powerful, flexible and scalable storage solutions for Microsoft’s .NET enterprise servers, including the Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, SQL Server 2000 and Exchange Server 2000 platforms.

TheBigFNI.com, a leading provider of online financial and insurance services, is the creator of Odyssey, a propriety credit risk analysis software system that utilizes Microsoft’s .NET enterprise servers. This EMC Proven company has consolidated its mission-critical Windows 2000-based information on EMC’s Symmetrix Enterprise Storage. Christopher Imrey, Chief Technology Officer at theBigFNI.com, said, “EMC was able to work with us to design a scalable Windows 2000 migration strategy that is able to handle the heavy growth that a “dot net” company like theBigFNI.com faces. Other vendor’s solutions would have required trade-outs in order for us to upgrade. EMC gave us a migration strategy and software tools that allowed us to maintain a 24×7 environment with zero downtime and allowed us to scale as we needed, while preserving our technology investment.”

A survey of 800 worldwide IS executives, conducted for EMC by research firm FIND/SVP, revealed a need for tools that allow Windows-based information to be integrated into data center environments. Nearly 80% of the large organizations questioned said they are moving data between different systems, including mainframes, UNIX systems and Windows platforms.

Jim Rothnie, EMC’s Senior Vice President of Product Management, said, “EMC is delivering the tools that allow customers to consolidate Windows 2000-based information onto an EMC E-Infostructure, grow it to the limits of technology, and protect and manage it to maximize their business productivity. Moreover, as Windows 2000 applications increasingly become mission-critical for organizations, these solutions provide the highest levels of scalability and availability to ensure a constant flow of information.”

EMC’s unique ability to provide simultaneous storage support for virtually every heterogeneous server, including mainframes, enables fast integration of Windows 2000-based information into enterprise computing environments. A new white paper, The Business Value of EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage in Windows 2000 and Windows NT-Based Application Deployments, provides in-depth analysis and is available at http://www.EMC.com .

EMC Extractor and EMC ResourcePak further enhance these capabilities. EMC Extractor provides users of Windows NT and Windows 2000 with direct, non-disruptive access to information residing on mainframe DB2 relational databases at speeds up to seven times faster than traditional access methods. EMC ResourcePak for Windows offers productivity enhancing software components designed specifically for Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 environments. Included within the ResourcePak are five key software tools for improving the availability, mobility, and manageability of mission critical Windows-based data: TimeFinder/SQL Server Integration Module, TimeFinder/Exchange Integration Module, TimeFinder Setup Wizard, Data Relocation Utility (DRU), and Symmetrix Integration Utilities (SIU).

A critical piece of EMC ResourcePak for Windows is the TimeFinder/SQL Server Integration Module (TSIM). This offering tightly integrates and automates the features of EMC TimeFinder with SQL Server 2000. With TimeFinder, customers are able to generate, in background mode, multiple independent mirrored copies of active production volumes in mainframe or open system processing activities. TimeFinder accomplishes this task with no impact to the production host or production volumes. The mirrored volumes can then be used to run tasks that otherwise cannot be performed without seriously impacting production availability, such as parallel processing and data management and storage.

With TSIM, TimeFinder functionality is extended to SQL Server 2000 customers, who can now use TSIM to do a full database backup with no impact to production or end users. TSIM also enables application testing, decision support, or the creation of a hot standby system. TSIM benefits enterprise productivity by significantly improved performance and management of information assets.

EMC and Microsoft formed a strategic global alliance in February 2000, the first centered specifically on Windows 2000. The two companies are working together in a number of areas to develop and implement solutions that combine Windows 2000 with EMC systems, software and services. As part of the alliance, EMC Enterprise Storage serves as the core storage platform for the Microsoft Partner Solution Center in Redmond, Wash.

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