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Marking its entry into the storage virtualization market, EMC revealed Invista, which is based on new technologies to help companies eliminate planned downtime as well as centralize and streamline storage management. Built with a highly scalable out-of-band architecture, Invista features software residing on storage area network switches that redirect requests from applications to physical storage arrays. Mark Lewis, executive vice president and chief development officer at EMC, said the beauty of EMC Invista is that it gives customers the flexibility to implement storage virtualization as a transparent process that’s additive and complementary to their existing infrastructures, while addressing very specific business needs like non-disruptive operation. “Customers will be able to deploy Invista in an EMC, IBM, Hitachi or any other qualified environment, while also taking advantage of valuable software they’ve already purchased for those storage platforms,” he said. EMC will complete Invista beta testing this quarter with general availability in the third quarter this year for EMC Connectrix-branded switches from Brocade and Cisco Systems. Support for McDATA is expected in early 2006. William Hurley, Enterprise Strategy Group analyst, said the EMC Invista SAN virtualization platform’s immediate support for heterogeneous storage products directly addresses unmet customer requirements for better intelligence in the SAN fabric. “Invista allows end-users to employ robust data management and movement function within the SAN fabric, providing operation simplicity and real cost savings,” he said.