EMC Ensures No-Compromise Business Continuity in IBM Clustered Mainframe Environments; EMC's Industry-leading SRDF Software Now Available for IBM GDPS - EMC's Symmetrix Remote Disaster Data Facility - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Nov 29, 1999

EMC Corporation, the world's leading provider of enterprise storage systems, software and services, Monday announced that it has enhanced its industry-leading business continuity solution, Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software, to support IBM's Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS) mainframe clustering solution. Customers who choose to employ GDPS and EMC's Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems now will gain the superior capabilities of SRDF to safeguard their most important business information.

The enhanced version of SRDF, which is shipping today, represents the first major development under EMC's expanded strategic technology and business alliance with IBM, which the companies unveiled in March. The alliance, which significantly expanded an existing business relationship between the two companies, will result in major benefits for many of IBM's and EMC's mutual customers.

In very large IBM S/390 environments, customers deploy GDPS to ensure the highest levels of application and data availability, even when the data spans multiple EMC Symmetrix systems. SRDF now provides these environments with the same world-class disaster recovery and assured business continuity available for applications requiring smaller databases located on individual Symmetrix systems in non-clustered mainframe and open systems environments.

"Enterprises running bet-the-business applications on GDPS, which is among the world's most advanced and available computing environments, will welcome the flexible, no-compromise data protection features of SRDF," said Carl Greiner, Vice President and Director, Enterprise Data Center Strategies, at META Group, of Stamford, CT. "This is another example of EMC leveraging and integrating its Symmetrix functionality with application failover software, enhancing the application's capability and the enterprise value proposition."

"EMC customers have made SRDF the solution of choice for protecting their most valuable corporate information," said Mark Ward, EMC's Vice President of Global Marketing. "Now, with SRDF and GDPS integration, customers in industries such as finance and telecommunications gain the ultimate combination of bullet-proof business continuity and massive computing power. Applications like transaction processing, data warehousing, and customer relationship management stay online while mission-critical information is fully protected from data loss and down time."

World's Most Popular Data Protection Solution

SRDF is an online, host-independent, mirrored data storage solution that automatically duplicates production data from a primary site to a secondary site. If the primary site becomes inoperable, SRDF enables rapid failover to the secondary site, allowing critical data to become available again to the business within minutes. First shipped in 1994, SRDF is the world's most successful and widely used business continuity solution, with more than 5,000 licenses sold.

In addition, SRDF support for GDPS enables customers to use EMC TimeFinder point-in-time copy software at the remote GDPS site. Now, for the first time, GDPS customers can create TimeFinder Business Continuity Volumes (BCVs) at the secondary site and use those volumes for flexible software development, batch processing and remote restart protection.

EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is the world's leading supplier of intelligent enterprise storage systems and software for mainframe and open systems environments. The company has offices worldwide, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC, and is a component of the S&P 500 Index. For further information about EMC products and services, EMC's corporate web site can be accessed at www.emc.com.