EMC Corporation, a provider of information management and storage solutions, has announced that it added more than 50 new EMC Rainfinity Global File Virtualization platform customers in the second quarter of 2006. Rainfinity continues to accelerate market penetration on the strength of its file virtualization capabilities for multi-vendor NAS (network-attached storage) environments and is being used to virtualize more than a petabyte (1,024 terabytes) of customer information in a wide range of industries and operating environments.

"File virtualization provides tremendous benefits and rapid return on investment for customers, making it an easy purchase for customers to justify," said Jack Norris, director of Virtualization Marketing, EMC Corporation. "Customers also recognize the importance of virtualization as a key component of their information infrastructure. The EMC Rainfinity platform is enabling our customers to enhance overall file storage efficiency, avoid proprietary vendor lock-in and leverage the full value of their investments in file storage."

"File virtualization has allowed us to optimize our storage environment without disrupting our end-user community," said Bill Fleming, director of IT at Baltimore, Maryland-based Johns Hopkins University, which includes nine academic and research divisions and numerous centers, institutes and affiliated entities. "With EMC Rainfinity, we experienced immediate results and it simplified our file management, helping us to better meet the demanding requirements of our many end-users."

"The rapid market penetration that EMC is achieving with its Rainfinity platform speaks to the clear merits of NAS virtualization for maximizing file movement efficiency, management agility and storage utilization," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "We are big proponents of NAS virtualization, and right now, EMC is the only leading storage vendor focusing on this area. While EMC is building its impressive customer list and expanding its business, the other storage leaders are missing the market."

EMC Rainfinity is deployed by customers in industries including automotive, aerospace, biotech, education, healthcare, manufacturing, technology and financial services -- including four of the top five U.S. banks. Simplifying the management of multi-vendor NAS devices and file systems via its advanced Global Namespace capability, Rainfinity includes a suite of integrated applications for optimizing capacity management, performance management, storage consolidation, tiered storage management and synchronous replication -- all from a single interface.

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