EMC opens new opportunities in mainframe and open storage markets with introduction of two new products

Business Wire, March 4, 1996

HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 4, 1996 -- EMC Corporation today introduced two major new products intended to expand its leadership position in the intelligent information storage and retrieval market. Each of the new products delivers an unprecedented solution to customers needing better access to, or faster backup for, their important business information.

o The new Extended-Online Storage (EOS) system is an entirely new line of high-capacity, disk-based storage systems that creates a new category in the mainframe information storage and retrieval market. EOS systems cost-effectively improve access to, thus increasing the value of, the large amounts of business support information currently stored on significantly slower offline systems. This is achieved through an optimized balance among capacity, performance and system functionality.

o The new EMC Data Manager (EDM) is the world's fastest automated backup solution for open systems. EDM is capable of automatically backing up -- from one centrally managed site -- as much as ten terabytes of data on hundreds of servers across a local area network (LAN). EDM backs up and recovers data from virtually every major open systems platform and operating system, and provides high-speed backup of Oracle, Sybase and Informix relational databases.

"EMC has long understood that not all information is created equal," said Michael C. Ruettgers, EMC's President and CEO. "We pride ourselves on delivering the right storage solutions to match the very specific and demanding requirements of today's information-centric computing models. With these new solutions, EMC is again leading the pack in helping customers improve productivity, deliver innovative products and services to market faster than their competition, and quickly grow revenues and market share."

EOS: Ushering in a New Era of Business Value for Historical Information

The new Extended-Online Storage (EOS) system delivers to mainframe customers an entirely new tier of information storage and retrieval technology. Extended-Online Storage allows customers, for the first time, to cost-effectively store large amounts of historical information on disk and access that information with significantly better application response times than the offline solutions currently used. As a result, EMC has extended the window of time that information can remain available to business support applications. Businesses will now handle customer calls, for example, through improved access to information from historical files without waiting for archived data to be retrieved from tape or optical media. This solution protects customers against excessive delays in resolving billing or other critical issues.

"This new offering from EMC has the potential to provide a wealth of data that we, for cost reasons, were forced to keep offline and just out of reach," said Al Pomerantz, Vice President, General Accident Insurance Company of America. "By enabling us to keep significantly more information readily accessible to our business support applications, Extended-Online Storage will allow us to greatly improve a number of critical information-intensive parts of our business and produce measurable impact on customer satisfaction."

"There's been a massive gap in the hierarchy of available storage solutions, until today," said Richard Blaschke, EMC's Vice President of Product Marketing. "Customers have had to choose between high-performance, highly intelligent online solutions that access data in milliseconds, and low-cost offline solutions that take seconds, minutes and much longer. As a result, customers have been forced to relegate critical business support information -- and, therefore, the priority of their customers' requests -- to second- or third-class status. With EOS, EMC is the first supplier to bridge that gap."

"With Extended-Online Storage, EMC is pushing disk-based storage devices down the storage hierarchy and attacking a fertile but as yet untapped piece of the overall storage systems market," said Robert Schafer, Meta Group's European Program Director, Enterprise Data Center Strategies. "EMC is again well-positioned to maintain its worldwide market share lead in 1996."

EOS is characterized by access times measured in sub-seconds and offers customers many of the benefits of intelligent, disk-based storage without the associated cost. Although tape, optical disk and microfilm remain viable for storing less time-sensitive information, an organization's more critical operations such as marketing and customer service require a specialized solution to support the business. Typical applications for EOS include customer inquiries of historical data -- account histories, transaction records, etc. -- and replicated data for executive information decision support.

EDM: Centralized, High-Performance Backup

The new EMC Data Manager is the world's fastest automated backup solution for open systems. EDM is a complete packaged tape backup solution utilizing exclusive EMC software that provides industry-leading backup performance of up to 70 gigabytes per hour and eliminates the need for costly, redundant backup hardware and software for each server platform.