Value America Selects EMC to Anchor Fast-Growing Internet Shopping Site; Web Retailer Accelerates Electronic Commerce Enhancements with EMC Enterprise Storage

Business Wire, July 28, 1999

HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 28, 1999--

EMC Corporation, the world's leading provider of enterprise storage systems, software and services, today announced that Value America, Inc., a leading Internet retailer offering more than 1,000 brands of consumer merchandise, has chosen EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and software as the foundation for an adaptive and reliable information infrastructure. The new information infrastructure will support the rapid growth of the company's online shopping site. Information for Value America's mission critical applications - including E-Commerce, data warehousing, customer service and SAP - will be managed by EMC Symmetrix systems and software.

Jerry K. Goode, ValueAmerica's Vice President and Chief Information Officer, said, "Our goal is to fully maximize the unlimited and fast-moving opportunities before us and never be constrained by rigid technology. This is precisely the strategy behind bringing in EMC early in our company's history. EMC has the most open and flexible storage solutions in the market. In addition, the operational savings of consolidating our data onto EMC will be dramatic because our information will be managed more efficiently."

"EMC Enterprise Storage also provides us with the rock-solid infrastructure we need to meet the rigorous demands of the rapidly expanding electronic commerce market," Goode added. "EMC Enterprise Storage will enable us to respond quickly to unexpected surges in demand, deliver significantly improved customer service, and accelerate the introduction of Internet features and services. In addition, EMC will allow us to launch updates for our Web site 24 hours a day at Internet speed to keep up with the product and pricing changes that stream in daily from hundreds of suppliers."

According to Goode, EMC Enterprise Storage also enables Value America to deliver a higher level of service quality and reliability. "Unlike brick and mortar stores, the Internet never sleeps. The built-in reliability of EMC storage combined with EMC's state-of-the-art software ensure that our customers shopping at 2:00 a.m. will have just as satisfying experience as those shopping during the day. For Value America, the ultimate benefit of EMC Enterprise Storage is that it allows us to serve our customers better, faster and more dependably, helping to deliver the superior shopping experience that sets us apart."

Value America, based in Charlottesville, Va., will use EMC TimeFinder software to create backup copies of its production and development systems without having to take them off-line. The result will be more frequent backups and dramatically shortened backup windows.

"Value America has rapid development cycles, with a new software release every two or three weeks," said Goode. "TimeFinder will accelerate the implementation of these releases as well as improve quality by providing our developers with more frequent iterations of our data for testing purposes. This is a huge benefit to streamlining and our development schedules and increasing software quality."

To further enhance information availability, Value America also will implement EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software to provide remote mirroring of data between primary and disaster recovery data centers.

Value America will deploy a Fibre Channel-enabled EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage system to deliver storage to its Hewlett-Packard UX, Sun Solaris, Windows NT and IBM Netfinity servers. In this open environment, EMC Volume Logix will enable storage administrators to control access to specific volumes by heterogeneous servers.

Robert Dutkowsky, EMC's Executive Vice President of Markets and Channels, said, "Value America is leading the online retail industry by making smart choices about protecting their information resources with EMC Enterprise Storage. The success of Value America and other electronic commerce firms will be measured in large part by how well they can manage, share and protect their information assets in a time of unprecedented and unpredictable growth. EMC has the only storage solution that can help them provide superior customer service, respond to changing business requirements on the fly, and keep their company moving at today's Web-driven pace."

EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is the world's technology and market leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent enterprise storage systems, software and services. The company's products store, retrieve, manage, protect and share information from all major computing environments, including UNIX, Windows NT and mainframe platforms. The company has offices worldwide, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC, and is a component of the S&P Index. For further information about EMC and its storage solutions, EMC's corporate web site can be accessed at http://www.EMC.com.

EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and EMC Enterprise Storage, SRDF, EMC TimeFinder and EMC Volume Logix are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.