EMC today announced a range of new products, solutions and services designed to enhance the value of the VMware View(TM) 4 desktop virtualization solutions. These offerings provide organizations with new technology capabilities, along with consulting services and actionable guidance to apply EMC(®) management and security controls for hosted virtual desktop environments.

Businesses across many industries and government entities are deploying hosted virtual desktops using VMware View solutions to centralize management, improve security, increase operational efficiencies, and address compliance. Centralizing the management of employees' desktop and laptop environments through virtualization and applying security controls such as strong authentication, data loss prevention, security information and event management along with management controls such as server configuration management, helps ensure key company and government assets remain available, shareable and secure.

"VMware View(TM) fundamentally transforms how desktops are managed within enterprises by enabling them to be delivered as a managed service," said Jocelyn Goldfein, vice president and general manager, Desktop Business Unit, VMware. "Together with EMC, we are enabling a complete set of services along with tested storage, security and management solutions that help enterprises increase agility and accelerate time to value while reducing desktop management costs."

EMC Storage Infrastructure for VMware View
The combination of EMC unified storage solutions and VMware View Composer products enables customers to deploy hosted virtual desktops at competitive pricing to traditional desktops while adding operational efficiencies, reducing storage costs, providing higher availability, and increasing flexibility that delivers greater overall business value. Greater efficiencies and cost savings are possible by leveraging additional EMC product features and technologies such as data deduplication and Enterprise Flash Disk drives.

Deploying VMware View on EMC's industry-leading unified storage systems provides a fully optimized infrastructure with high levels of availability and disaster recovery capabilities. Leveraging PC over IP also enables a robust desktop experience for end users.

For businesses and government organizations seeking expertise in leveraging VMware View(TM) based on EMC information infrastructure and customer deployment best practices, EMC offers comprehensive consulting services that accelerate projects, guarantee outcomes, and integrate VMware and EMC technologies together. An example presented at VMworld 2009 based on a customer project was the intellectual property to integrate VMware View Composer, VMware vCenter(TM) Site Recovery Manager and EMC Replication technologies -- for turnkey disaster recovery for virtualized clients.

"Desktop virtualization holds tremendous promise for improved controls, management and security compared to traditional desktop and laptop environments. Together, EMC and VMware are working to bring the full range of these efficiency, management, agility and security benefits to customers," said Chad Sakac, EMC Vice President, VMware Technology Alliance. "Key examples of this collaboration, including those announced today, will help customers transition to or expand their virtual desktop environments smoothly and with minimal risk."

New Solution from EMC's RSA Security Division
Securing endpoints such as laptops and desktops to reduce security risks such as accidental data loss, theft or inappropriate access to sensitive information and applications is one of the biggest challenges in IT today. Another cornerstone of the new EMC offerings to combat these risks is the RSA® Solution for VMware View, an integrated set of RSA and EMC(®) Ionix(®) technologies which, in conjunction with VMware View, enhance management and security of virtualized desktops. As part of the solution, RSA announced the RSA SecurBook(TM) for VMware View solution, which provides detailed guidance for deploying and administering key security controls in hosted virtual desktop environments. Specifically, the RSA SecurBook solution details how businesses may integrate RSA(®) Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Endpoint, RSA enVision(®) technology, RSA(®) SecurID(®) authentication and EMC Ionix Server Configuration Manager within a VMware View environment.

"RSA SecurBook for VMware View(TM) is designed to provide business users with a conceptual guide to think about endpoint security in a hosted virtual desktop environment and can also help bridge the gap between business and security professionals," said Jon Oltsik, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, who authored a new white paper titled Desktop Virtualization Management, and Security. "This type of guidance puts organizations in a position to maximize the operational and security benefits from virtual desktop investments."

Technology capabilities delivered as part of the RSA solution include:

• Ensuring Data Confidentiality: As part of the solution for VMware View, RSA now addresses the risk of sensitive data leakage by delivering integration with the RSA DLP Suite. Specifically, with RSA DLP Endpoint, administrators can configure data detection policies to discover sensitive information and enforce controls across all workstations in the enterprise from a centralized location.
• Monitoring Security Events and Demonstrating Compliance: The RSA enVision security information and event management (SIEM) platform now delivers the ability to monitor user and administrator actions within VMware View. In addition, the RSA enVision platform is designed to monitor and report on the VMware vSphere(TM) environment to enable organizations to make better security decisions based on more accurate and timely security intelligence.
• Establishing Trusted Identities: RSA SecurID two-factor authentication provides an added layer of security to ensure the right user can access the relevant virtual session and the most sensitive content within the virtual desktop environment. Specifically, RSA SecurID is engineered to integrate with VMware View to enable customers to enforce strong authentication to the VMware View portal and with the VMware ESX Service Console to protect administrative access.
  

In addition, EMC Ionix Server Configuration Manager (SCM) has been documented in the RSA SecurBook solution to support managing changes and configurations within the VMware View environment. EMC Ionix SCM offers organizations tools to automate the process of identifying configuration changes that violate policy to help reduce security risk. The software is designed to monitor virtual desktops, send automatic alerts, and can remediate configuration problems when systems need to be fine-tuned to ensure compliance or service levels. EMC Ionix SCM combines discovery, policy management, change/remediation, and reporting to increase operational efficiency, decrease costs, and ensure secure, compliant and up-to-date configurations across physical and virtualized desktop and server environments

EMC Consulting and Delivery Expertise
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure services from EMC Consulting offer organizations the ability to decrease the cost of desktop management while improving overall service delivery. These services help clients plan an effective desktop virtualization strategy and architecture, develop business justification for the initiative, determine viability through proof of concept and pilot engagement models and establish enterprise architectures with robust administration and management, hardened security, and business continuity. A virtual desktop infrastructure will provide increased business agility, improve user response time and enable user access from almost any device -- in ways not possible with traditional desktop technologies.