HOPKINTON, Mass. - February 25, 2009
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that it has been cited as “the most prevalent storage vendor in their overall environments” according to a survey of 124 global IT decision-makers currently using x86 server virtualization technology. The January 2009 report titled Storage Choices For Virtual Server Environments also revealed that 98 percent of the 124 survey respondents were using VMware ESX in their virtual server environments, and that 78 percent have virtual server technology in use for production application workloads.
According to the survey 48 percent of respondents chose EMC as their brand of networked storage for virtual servers – nearly two times more prominent than the next closest storage provider. The next closest vendor was used by only 25 percent of survey respondents. Additionally, 63 percent of the respondents prefer to buy from a single storage vendor which illustrates that buyers show a preference for working with a single storage vendor.
“Customers are moving to virtualized environments to support their most critical workloads and are choosing EMC networked storage for their virtual information infrastructure,” said Frank Hauck, EMC Executive Vice President, Global Marketing and Customer Satisfaction. “EMC has invested in extensive integration, interoperability, joint engineering, and solution validation across EMC’s portfolio to enhance the capability of all of our products to support VMware, and enable our customers to realize greater business and operational value from their EMC and VMware Infrastructure environments.”
“To achieve many of the benefits of server virtualization, such as the flexibility to move virtual machines between physical hosts for workload balancing and high availability, physical hosts must be networked to shared storage,” wrote Andrew Reichman, Senior Analyst, Forrester in the report. “While heterogeneity is a complicated reality for many storage environments, 63% respondents indicate that they have purchased storage for virtual server environments from only one vendor…According to the respondents of this survey, EMC is the most prevalent storage vendor in their overall environments….”
Key product integrations that enable EMC’s customers to unlock more value from their information infrastructure and virtualized environment include:
Storage resource management that integrates with VMware’s vCenter Server and ESX server APIs to unify management environments using EMC ControlCenter®
VMware vClient Server-integrated dependency and root cause analysis with EMC Smarts®, advanced data de-duplication backup and recovery optimized for VMware using EMC Avamar®, EMC NetWorker® and EMC Data Protection Advisor
Business continuity data protection enabled by the industry’s most comprehensive support of Site Recovery Manager
VMware vCenter Server integrated array snapshots with Replication Manager
EMC Symmetrix® or EMC CLARiiON® QoS software with VMware DRS to deliver end-to-end quality of service for VMware environments.
In January 2009 EMC became a gold-level VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) to help enterprise customers around the world accelerate the business benefits they can realize by virtualizing their information infrastructures and data centers.
To read the Forrester survey, please go to: http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/2009-forrester-storage-choices-virtual-server.pdf

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Sunnyvale, Calif.—February 24, 2009—In an effort to help customers maximize the value of their existing storage investments, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced the industry’s first-ever Guarantee* Program for installed third-party storage. As an addition to NetApp’s existing Virtualization Guarantee Program, which was introduced in September 2008, NetApp is offering a guarantee that customers will decrease their non-NetApp primary storage capacity for virtual server environments by 35% using NetApp® V-Series and deduplication technology.
Now customers have more ways to save with NetApp’s Virtualization Guarantee Program. Customers can take advantage of NetApp’s guarantee that they will use 50% less storage in their VMware®, Citrix, and Microsoft® virtual environments with NetApp storage compared to traditional storage arrays. Alternatively, for customers that already own EMC, IBM, HP, or HDS storage systems, NetApp will reduce redundant copies of their primary data by at least 35% with NetApp V-Series.
“Customers are stretching their budgets and looking to lower their overall infrastructure costs while minimizing the risk of their IT investments,” said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer of NetApp. “While server virtualization is a way for customers to achieve greater efficiency in the data center, NetApp further fulfills this promise with our storage efficiency capabilities that help not only save space and cost but also minimize risk of their storage investments. Now we’re assuring customers that they can realize efficiencies with our competitors’ storage using NetApp V-Series. No other storage vendor is willing or able to match this guarantee.”
Now NetApp customers can achieve greater storage capacity utilization on inefficient systems that they already purchased and deployed and tap into the unrealized potential of their existing storage infrastructures. NetApp provides the most complete storage efficiency technologies for virtual server environments so that customers can improve protection of their data assets, buy less storage, and reduce their overall power, space, and cooling costs in their data centers.
NetApp V-Series is an open storage controller that unifies NetApp and non-NetApp storage under a common storage architecture. V-Series enables customers to take full advantage of the benefits of the powerful features of Data ONTAP® such as deduplication, thin provisioning, and Snapshot™ technology, to improve storage efficiency and dramatically simplify data management. NetApp deduplication has become one of the fastest growing technologies in the company’s history, with more than 28,000 systems deployed across all tiers of data, including primary, backup, and archival.
Availability and Requirements
Customers anywhere in the world who purchase a new V-Series system for their virtual desktop and server environment, including Citrix XenServer, VMware ESX, and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V™, can take advantage of this program. If customers don’t improve their storage capacity on competitive storage systems by at least 35% with NetApp V-Series and deduplication (and after following established best practices implemented by NetApp Professional Services), NetApp will provide the additional storage capacity needed to meet customers’ shortfall, valued up to 35% of the original controller purchased, at no additional charge*. Qualifying service delivery is available from NetApp Global Services or participating Authorized Professional Service Partners in networked storage for virtualized platforms.
For more information, visit www.netapp.com/guarantee, where you can access program details including FAQs, technical resources, best practices, and the new NetApp Storage Efficiency Calculator to evaluate your current environment and learn how NetApp storage efficiency technologies can lead to higher storage utilization.

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SUNNYVALE, Calif., February 24, 2009 – Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR), the leader in high-performance networking, today reinforced its commitment to the data center by disclosing the existence of a program within the company to deliver the next generation data center fabric. The program, code-named the Stratus Project, represents an initiative to create a single data center fabric that will deliver a quantum jump in scale, performance and simplicity, with the flexibility to support fully converged and virtualized data center environments. The Stratus Project is being developed by the newly announced Data Center Business Group, under the leadership of Executive Vice President David Yen, Ph.D.

Juniper Networks has a vision for a Cloud Computing Infrastructure that enables operational innovation based on the ability to connect everything and empower everyone. This vision paves the way to super data centers which can harness the scale to dynamically allocate any resource, including routing and security services, storage, appliances and servers – without compromise. Legacy architectures constrain today’s data centers as they attempt to cope with the exponential increase in applications, servers, storage and network traffic. By rethinking the network from the ground up, Juniper has created a long-term strategy to develop a single data center fabric with the flexibility and performance to scale to super data centers, while continuing to drive down the cost and complexity of managing the data center information infrastructure.

“Juniper’s Stratus Project addresses the modern mega data center’s pain points and endeavors to enable cloud computing to fulfill its maximum potential,” said Yen. “Reinventing and flattening the data center network is a very hard problem to solve and it requires a unique set of expertise and resources to tackle this challenge. High-performance businesses are in search of operational innovation and Juniper is committed to helping customers advance the economics of high-performance networking by creating a more elastic and efficient infrastructure from which to deliver services at unmatched scale while minimizing total cost of ownership.”

A Breakthrough to Connect Everything, Empower Everyone

The Stratus Project, which has been underway for more than one year, was coined after the meteorological term ’stratus,’ defined as a flat, single-layer cloud. The Project, initially inspired and led by Juniper’s CTO and Founder Pradeep Sindhu, now spans across multiple business groups and has resulted in more than 30 patent applications filed to date.

Juniper’s expertise, innovative engineering and technological advantages in software, hardware systems, silicon and network architecture will be leveraged to uniquely address customer needs with a data center fabric designed to be:

Flat, non-blocking and lossless to support converged traffic at 10 Gigabit Ethernet access port speed and optimized for server virtualization
Scalable: from tens of ports to tens of thousands of 10GbE ports
Fast: with up to an order of magnitude improvement in latency over today’s data center networks
Reliable: carrier-class, with no single point of failure or downtime for reconfiguration and maintenance
Secure: offering tightly integrated and virtualized security services
Simple: presenting itself as a single, very large switch based on JUNOS® software, a single network operating system
Juniper Networks Data Center Infrastructure Solutions Today

Juniper introduced its first Data Center Infrastructure Solutions in November 2008, which are designed to advance IT initiatives for data center consolidation, server virtualization and sustainable information technology. The Juniper Data Center Infrastructure Solutions are comprised of the EX Series Ethernet Switches, including the new EX8200 line, MX Series Ethernet Services Routers and SRX Series Services Gateways. The solutions offered today can significantly reduce network complexity and total cost of ownership by up to 52 percent in capital expenditures, up to 44 percent in power, up to 44 percent in cooling and up to 55 percent in rack space in the data center.

Today, Juniper also announced its first 10 Gigabit access switch for data center access, the EX2500 line. The EX2500 switches address high-performance server access requirements with twenty-four 10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP+ ports which deliver wire-speed performance and 700 nanosecond latency. The EX2500 will be available in the second quarter of 2009 at a starting price of US$18,000.

Technologies created from the Stratus Project, when available for purchase, will augment and enhance the current Juniper Networks portfolio, providing additional options to lower their total cost of operations.

Visit the Juniper Networks Data Center Infrastructure Solutions website for more information or contact your Juniper Networks representative or authorized partner for additional information.

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SAN FRANCISCO – February 24, 2009 – Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, announced today that its WAN optimization solution won the highest honor, a gold award, in Storage Magazine’s 2008 Storage Products of the Year Awards, Networking equipment category. The Riverbed® WAN optimization solution has been previously recognized in the same category by Storage Magazine, winning the Silver award in 2007 and the Bronze award in 2006.

Judges and editors of SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine selected the 2008 winners in five storage product categories: Backup and disaster recovery software and services; Backup hardware; Disk and disk subsystems; Networking equipment; and Storage management tools. The awards program recognized the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS®) 5.0 in the Networking equipment category, noting “major improvements for Steelhead® customers.” To see additional comments from the judging panel, please visit: http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/
productsOfTheYearCategory/0,294802,sid5_tax313328_ayr2008,00.html

RiOS 5.0 offers customers unparalleled flexibility for their WAN optimization deployment. Within this version, Riverbed introduced the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), which enables the delivery of branch office services without the need to deploy a full-blown server. The RSP allows cus tomers to deploy best-of-breed software on Steelhead appliances in a self-contained partition to minimize the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office. Riverbed also became the first WAN optimization vendor to provide native application-level acceleration for Exchange 2007 and to offer enhanced acceleration for frequently utilized web applications such as SAP NetWeaver, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Oracle 11i, and SharePoint.

Riverbed has since upgraded RiOS with the release of version 5.5 in October 2008. Within this release, Riverbed enables enterprises to further consolidate IT infrastructure, enhance worker productivity and accelerate data protection, helping CIOs support a more efficient workforce and IT environment while reducing operational and financial investment. With RiOS 5.5, up to five third-party applications or services can be installed on a Steelhead appliance, including Microsoft Windows server 2008. Riverbed also introduced a set of industry firsts for WAN optimization, by accelerating Lotus Notes and MAPI encrypted traffic at the application layer, as well as MAPI 2007 and Oracle Forms for mobile workers. In addition, Riverbed broadened its solutions to provide faster, more cost-effective replication and backup among data centers by automatically adjusting the optimization settings depending on the workload.

“Being recognized by Storage Magazine for the third year in a row is a testament to our continued innovation,” said Eric Wolford, Riverbed’s senior vice president of marketing and business development. “We listen to our customers’ needs and map product development to provide solutions that address the challenges they face everyday – from application acceleration over the WAN to disaster recovery in the data center to increasing IT infrastructure performance while cutting costs.”

To learn more about Storage Magazine’s 2008 Product of the Year Awards, visit:

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/productsOfTheYear/0,294801,sid5_ayr2008,00.html

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SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — SonicWALL, Inc. , a leading secure network infrastructure company, today announced the SonicWALL SSL VPN 3.5 release, bringing key new enterprise level features to small- to mid-sized businesses (SMBs), including mobile support, enhanced remote support, a sleeker interface design, and IPv6 compatibility. The launch of SonicWALL’s 3.5 firmware update provides users with easy-to-use, secure and clientless remote support and remote access to a broad range of resources on the corporate network.
Today, the office is wherever an employee is in a given moment — at home, at the airport, or even at a cafe. In an ever more competitive global marketplace, companies, regardless of size, need to provide network access to its employees, contractors, customers, and partners, from anywhere at any time. Designed to simplify the management and control access for a distributed workforce, the SSL VPN 3.5 is a versatile and cost effective solution. In addition to securing the corporate network, the SonicWALL appliance also helps companies increase remote worker productivity.
“SonicWALL has long provided industry leading SSL VPN solutions to firms, irrespective of their size,” said Chris Witeck, Director of Product Management at SonicWALL. “With SonicWALL’s SSL VPN 3.5, even the smallest business can have secure remote access that offers more flexibility and support than ever before and at a price that fits comfortably within their budget.”
The SonicWALL SSL VPN 3.5 enhances its existing lineup of features by incorporating the following new features:
- NetExtender Mobile: Providing support for all Windows Mobile devices
- Standalone Virtual Assist: Enabling an enhanced remote support
experience for the technician
- Virtual Assist for Mac operating systems: Allowing remote access support
to Mac users (in addition to the existing support for Windows operating
systems)
- Redesigned Virtual Office: A streamlined interface design to increase
ease-of-use for the end user
- Application Offloading: Enabling the user to securely access Web
applications without a client while still leveraging the strong
authentication and granular access policy features of the SSL VPN
appliance, leading to potentially lower support costs for an
organization
- IPv6: Facilitating customers to make a smooth transition to this new
standard in the future

“More and more of our employees are working from home or on the move, meaning we have to find ways to have access to the tools they need to work while keeping our company network safe,” said Mike Thompson, IT Project Manager for Remco Group. “SonicWALL’s SSL VPN is perfect for our needs — eliminating any lengthy set up time and providing a level of flexibility to us and our employees that we have not experienced before.”
For more information please visit: http://www.sonicwall.com.

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Redwood City, CA — February 24, 2009

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP), the worldwide leader in securing the Internet, today announced its new Software Blade architecture, the industry’s first architecture to meet businesses’ need for total, flexible and manageable security. The new architecture empowers businesses with the ability to select from a library of over 20 software blades the exact security protections necessary and dynamically tailor security gateways for different environments and sites.

Security environments of large, medium and small companies are becoming more complex as they attempt to address continually evolving threats. Many organizations complain about the need to use multiple products, hardware platforms, management consoles and daily monitoring systems. Check Point Software Blade architecture offers businesses a common platform to deploy independent, modular and interoperable security applications or “software blades” – such as firewall, virtual private network (VPN), intrusion prevention system (IPS), anti-virus, policy management or provisioning blades. The architecture allows customers to select the exact security software blades they need and then to combine them into a single, centrally managed gateway.

“We are proud to introduce a new paradigm in security; one that meets today’s complex threat environment with refreshing simplicity,” said Gil Shwed, chairman and chief executive officer at Check Point. “To address each new risk businesses can now consolidate multiple security systems by simply activating software blades on their Check Point security platform. Check Point Software Blade architecture gives businesses the flexibility to create a unified security infrastructure that can be extended to fit their growing needs.”

With the new Software Blade architecture customers will be able to move functionality from one system to another, consolidate or split functionalities between systems and guarantee performance for each software blades by setting usage thresholds. All these capabilities will enable customers to scale their security needs while reducing security cost of ownership.

For example, a business could start with a single core, single blade firewall system. That business can turn on functionalities such as VPN, network anti-virus, VoIP security and intrusion prevention by adding four blades turning their system into a five blade system. To meet their performance needs the system can be upgraded into a two, four or eight core computing system, enabling multi-gigabit performance with the extended functionality.

“For businesses a unified line of gateways with centralized management securing both external and internal security zones is very beneficial,” said Charles Riordan, business leader, network security and audit at Visa Inc. “Moving to Check Point Software Blade architecture with its performance enhancing core associations is something enterprises like Visa may well take advantage of moving into the future. Bottom line is Check Point’s new architecture and foresight looks to be spot on with what the industry needs.”

Key benefits of the Check Point Software Blade Architecture include:

• Flexibility – Provides the right level of protection at the right level of investment
• Manageability – Enables fast deployment of security functions and increased productivity through central management of software blades
• Total Security – Provides the right level of security, at all enforcement points, and at all layers of the network
• Guaranteed performance – Enables performance setting per blade to ensure guaranteed performance
• Lower TCO - Protects investment by enabling consolidation and leveraging existing infrastructure

“IDC expects the next generation of security products to offer more flexibility in both features and deployment options, a trend that is accelerated by the current state of the economy and the demand for more cost-effective solutions. Check Point’s new Software Blade architecture offers customers important flexibility and customization options to deliver security tailored to each enterprise’s specific environment,” said Andrew Hanson, network and endpoint security analyst at IDC. “Software Blades’ modular approach can also supply cost saving benefits as they can be deployed dynamically without the need to upgrade hardware, firmware or drivers.”

Software blades can be deployed on Check Point UTM-1® or Power-1® appliances as well as open servers. Additional information on the new Check Point Software Blade architecture can be found at: www.checkpoint.com/products/softwareblades/architecture/index.html.

“Check Point Software Blades offer customers a revolutionary architecture to create a security system that is uniquely flexible and can expand to optimize their existing infrastructure,” concluded Shwed.

Pricing and Availability
Check Point Software Blades are available immediately and can be purchased through Check Point’s worldwide network of value-added resellers. For information on pricing and licensing, visit https://pricelist.checkpoint.com. To find a Check Point partner, visit www.checkpoint.com.

About Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (www.checkpoint.com) is the leader in securing the Internet. Check Point offers total security solutions featuring a unified gateway, single endpoint agent and single management architecture, customized to fit customers’ dynamic business needs. This combination is unique and is a result of our leadership and innovation in the enterprise firewall, personal firewall/endpoint, data security and VPN markets.

Check Point’s pure focus is on information security. Through its NGX platform, Check Point delivers a unified security architecture to protect business communications and resources, including corporate networks and applications, remote employees, branch offices and partner extranets. The company also offers market-leading endpoint and data security solutions with Check Point Endpoint Security products, protecting and encrypting sensitive corporate information stored on PCs and other mobile computing devices. Check Point’s award-winning ZoneAlarm solutions protect millions of consumer PCs from hackers, spyware and identity theft. Check Point solutions are sold, integrated and serviced by a network of Check Point partners around the world and its customers include 100 percent of Fortune 100 companies and tens of thousands of businesses and organizations of all sizes.

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Ian talked about Cisco’s already small business commitment with Linksys. This new commitment will be broken up into three categories.

1. Cisco Small Business - this category will be developed for the business with less than 100 employees. Products will be designed to solve a specific problem such as network security, VoIP, wireless, video, and storage.

2. Cisco Small Business Pro - this category will be similar to the first one except that it is geared toward businesses with <250 employees and the products will be setup and managed by a partner.

3. Cisco - no change here, this is the category for the existing larger business using the existing Cisco products.

An Interesting part of this webinar was the announcement about using the cloud to run some of the solutions. This will allow the devices sitting in the small business's office to leverage the cloud for scalability and flexibility. This will allow a business to grow without upgrading hardware and potential downtime possibly associated with that process.

If you want to watch the webinar, here is a link.

The webcast, “Drive Down Costs and Increase Efficiencies in Backup and Recovery for VMware Environments” will be held on:
Date: Mar 05, 09
Time: 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM EST
Click here to find out more information

The second webcast, “How to Stretch Your Retail IT Budget with EMC Avamar Backup and Recovery for VMware” will be held on:
Date: Mar 11, 09
Time: 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM EDT
Click here to find out more information

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — February 20, 2009 — Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Mazu Networks. Riverbed also announced that it has appointed Mazu CEO Paul Brady to run the Riverbed Application Intelligence Business Unit.

The acquisition of Mazu allows Riverbed to meet enterprise and service provider customer demands by extending its suite of WAN optimization products to include global application performance reporting and analytics. The Mazu products, which have been renamed Cascade, analyze network traffic to provide valuable information about the interactions of and dependencies between users, applications and systems. As a result, Riverbed will now be able to deliver to its enterprise and service provider customers faster, smarter and more efficient IT infrastructure performance solutions.

“Riverbed has become the leading IT infrastructure performance company by delivering the benefits of speed, scale and simplicity to thousands of customers around the world, and WAN optimization will continue to be the primary driver of our ongoing success,” said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development. “Riverbed Cascade appliances provide scale to our customers’ ability to monitor the optimization and performance of their key applications and allow us to deliver simplicity in the analysis and reporting of that information across a customer’s entire environment.”

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA — February 19, 2009 — Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, today announced its participation at VMworld Europe 2009, taking place February 24-26 at The Palais des Festivals in Cannes. In addition, Riverbed® customer Lantmännen, one of the largest groups in the food, energy and agricultural industries in the Nordic region, will share its real-world experience of its WAN optimization implementation to drastically reduce IT infrastructure costs by eliminating latency and bandwidth issues while delivering LAN-like performance to remote users.

Who: Dennis Jansson, CSO and Network Manager, Lantmännen
When: Tue 24th Feb – 15:15
Where: Room: Auditorium I
The Palais des Festivals, Cannes
What: VMware ESX Plus WAN Optimization: How Lantmännen Will Save USD 17M in Data Center Costs and Help Protect the Environment

Now in its second year, VMworld Europe sets the virtualization agenda, inspiring all IT professionals looking for actionable ideas, innovative products and best practices for virtualizing the enterprise.

At its booth (# 87), Riverbed will demonstrate how its award-winning WAN optimization solutions, in conjunction with VMware solutions, enable organizations to overcome IT consolidation and disaster recovery (DR) challenges. Riverbed WAN optimization solutions and VMware Infrastructure provide the ability to simplify server management through virtualization, and at the same time accelerate the replication, recovery, and rollout of servers. The combined solution enables any enterprise to implement an easy-to-manage, robust DR system that simultaneously improves recoverability while controlling the costs of the physical infrastructure that DR requires.

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