EMC’s Market-Leading Networked Storage Systems Named 2006 Readers’ Choice Award Winners by Windows IT Pro Magazine

EMC CLARiiON and EMC Centera Recognized by Windows Community for Storage Excellence

Hopkinton, Mass.-Tuesday, September 5, 2006, EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced that two of its market-leading networked storage systems have been named 2006 Readers’ Choice Award winners by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro magazine for excellence in the Windows market. Kim Paulsen, Group Publisher of Windows IT Pro, announced the winners of the fifth-annual contest on September 1.

More than 5,200 readers were asked to vote from among more than 750 products and services in twelve broad technology categories. In the Best Storage Products category, the EMC® CLARiiON® CX family of networked storage systems won Best Storage Area Network (SAN) Array, and in the Best Disaster Prevention/Recovery Tools category, the EMC Centera™ series of content addressed storage (CAS) platforms won Best Enterprise Backup/Recovery/Archive Hardware.

“We are truly honored that the readers of Windows IT Pro consider EMC CLARiiON and EMC Centera the best products in their respective categories,” said BJ Jenkins, EMC Vice President of Global Marketing. “These awards are further proof of EMC’s ongoing commitment to offering our customers and partners solutions that provide a unique combination of leading information infrastructure technology and advanced service capabilities for Microsoft environments.”

“The 2006 Windows IT Pro Readers’ Choice Awards continue our tradition of honoring products that our readers tell us are most worthy of recognition,” said Paulsen. “These are the hardware, software and services that measure up where it counts most ¬– in the businesses, agencies and institutions that rely on them to deliver what they promise.”

“The IT pros who voted in this year’s awards are tough, in-the-trenches critics,” Paulsen continued. “They demand solid value and performance from the products they use and put those products to the test day after day. EMC can feel proud that the products they develop have earned the respect and recognition of the IT world’s most knowledgeable and exacting professionals.”

EMC CLARiiON: Unmatched Performance, Scalability, Affordability and Ease of Use

EMC CLARiiON is the market-leading mid-tier storage platform. EMC recently announced the EMC CLARiiON UltraScale™ CX3 series, the third generation of the industry-leading CLARiiON CX platform. The storage industry’s first platform with end-to-end 4-gigabit-per-second (Gb/s) Fibre Channel technology, the new CLARiiON UltraScale architecture features up to twice the performance and twice the capacity of its predecessor – and enables customers to consolidate twice the workload of competitive systems.

Charles King, Principal Analyst for Pund-IT, Inc., said, “EMC’s CLARiiON CX family offers customers solutions that meet their requirements for storage performance, scalability and reliability – and the systems have become much easier to implement and manage. Overall, EMC continues to please its growing customer and partner base with solutions like the new CLARiiON UltraScale CX3 systems.”

EMC Centera: Affordable and Secure Information Archiving

With Centera, EMC pioneered the concept of content addressed storage (CAS). Designed exclusively for fixed digital content, EMC Centera provides fast, affordable, secure online access with capabilities to address day-to-day business, governance and regulatory needs. EMC Centera works with more than 400 partners, resellers and many of the world’s leading ISVs to provide applications and solutions for a wide range of industries. EMC Centera has well over 3,000 customers, and more than 100 petabytes (102,400 terabytes) of capacity have been shipped since its introduction in April 2002.

About Windows IT Media

Penton’s Windows IT Media, the largest independent Windows IT community in the world, includes the flagship print publication Windows IT Pro. First published in 1995, Windows IT Pro is the editorial leader in its field and has a paid subscription base of 110,000. The magazine is published in 13 languages and has an international reach into 160 countries. Windows IT Pro UPDATE, the group’s flagship e-mail newsletter, is the only e-newsletter to make BtoB magazine’s Media Power 50 list.

Windows IT Media also includes SQL Server Magazine and MSD2D. SQL Server Magazine has 30,000 paid subscribers, and three e-mail newsletters that are sent to more than 130,000 opt-in subscribers. MSD2D is a rich online information resource for IT professionals, with a focus on the software developer community. MSD2D has a robust product mix that includes a vertical search engine, websites, partner directories, e-mail newsletters, trade show programs and Web seminars.

The Windows IT Media network has 2.5 million unique visitors to its websites each month, and more than one million subscribers opt-in to one or more email newsletters. Windows IT Media is the world’s leading producer of custom roadshows, paid conferences and paid workshops for Windows and SQL Server IT professionals. For more information visit www.winnetmag.com/pressroom and www.windowsitmedia.com.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information storage and management that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.
For more on EMC news, events, and recent media coverage visit the news section of EMC.com. Note to editors: For further information about this release contact EMC Public Relations at pr@emc.com

EMC and CLARiiON are registered trademarks, and Centera and UltraScale are trademarks of EMC Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Hadley Weinzierl

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EMC Corporation

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