EMC is throwing itself a little party known as EMC World this week in Las Vegas, and has already made several cloud-related announcements while in town. One of them (see end of this article) led me to think about sending Big Data to the moon.
Hybrid Approach
Hybrid cloud – a term I hope goes away soon, along with public and private cloud – was central to an announcement about the VMax family of enterprise-storage arrays. In a nutshell, EMC says this storage is bigger, faster, and easier to deploy. It’s also aimed at customers with concerns about Big Data, too. The “simplified management capabilities (of VMAX) are central to achieving the level of performance, data protection, and management customers are facing,” according to Benjamin Woo of IDC.
The VPlex operating environment received an upgrade, too, and now delivers 40% more performance than before, according to EMC. The company claims “the industry’s only high availability three-site data center protection solution for active/active Hybrid Cloud deployments with its RecoverPoint software running within VPlex.”
I’ll Recover
Speaking of backup and recovery, EMC also announced new deduplication systems and software aimed to address bottlenecks caused by legacy backup systems, ie, “dealing with slow and unreliable tape-based recoveries.” Jason Buffington from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) said EMC meets the need of “IT transformation initiatives (who) are driving new requirements for backup and recovery, and users need to be able to architect and optimize their data protection infrastructure to meet their specific needs.”
BFF VMware
EMC didn’t leave VMware out of the mix, announcing an extension of the companies’ partnership, to deliver to storage analytics. Specifically, the EMC VNX Storage Analytics Suite and EMC VNX Connector for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite are planned to be available this quarter, the companies said.
VMware VP Ramin Sayar said, “the powerful combination of EMC storage intelligence and VMware’s vCenter Operations Management Suite will offer automated optimization and simplicity for our joint customers…organizations of all sizes can proactively manage their overall infrastructure system health, as they continue to automate and transform their IT infrastructure.»
Rich Napolitano, President of EMC’s Unified Storage Division noted “the benefits of total transparency into storage systems, in both physical and virtualized infrastructures, (which) are staggering. VNX Storage Analytics Suite is designed to capitalize on this transparency by offering simplified storage management, optimized performance and easily maintained service levels for unprecedented efficiency.”
Big Data
As far as Big Data goes, EMC’s cloud announcement was a bit more vaporous, with an announcement of “readying” the next version of the Isilon OneFS NAS operating system – code name “Mavericks.” The company said the new version, due sometime this year, will bring “new levels of data protection, security, system performance and interoperability.”
IDC’s Benjamin Woo was quite excited about this one, saying, «A major factor that sets Isilon apart in this era of Big Data is its interoperability with a wide array of applications delivered through a range of industry standard protocols. Isilon recently enhanced this capability to include native integration with Hadoop. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is again raising the bar on interoperability with enhanced integration with VMware and a new platform API that provides additional options to enterprises to integrate and manage Isilon storage systems with third-party applications….innovations like these strongly position Isilon scale-out NAS to help enterprises successfully address the challenges of Big Data.»
ESG’s Terri McClure was also enthusiastic, saying, “EMC Isilon pioneered the delivery of scale-out NAS to address these needs. With OneFS ‘Mavericks,’ Isilon is building on that leadership by providing increased levels of data protection and performance to meet the still emerging business requirements in this new world of Big Data in the enterprise.»
VaaS, perhaps?
“IT-as-a-Service” – isn’t that the same thing as Infrastructure-as-a-Service? – was the topic of EMC’s DataBridge enterprise management tool announcement. Databridge “mashes up” (ie, converges) IT operations data, “transforming silos of disparate compute, storage and network management information into use-case specific DataBridge widgets for better visibility across the infrastructure,” EMC says.
Also available “later this year,” DataBridge puts real-time IT infrastructure management onto ye olde “single pane of glass,” the company says. Oh, I get it .. it’s IT-Management-as-a-Service. Howzabout Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS)?
In any case, EMC’s DataBridge “will include the DataBridge studio, an enterprise mashup environment where customers will go to build DataBridge widget. With DataBridge studio, customers can build and add new DataBridge widgets to their DataBridge library to share with others in the organization,” the company says.
Stuck in the Middle With You
You mid-range customers shouldn’t feel left out, as EMC has reduced by 38% the initial acquisition cost for Flash drive tiers. Its VNXe series will also deliver 50% more performance and capacity per rack unit, the company says.
ESG weighed in on this one, too, with Mark Peters saying, «EMC’s multifaceted enhancements to its VNX unified storage family hit on many different, crucial storage pain points experienced by IT generalists. EMC’s transformation of its midrange storage offerings…demonstrates its deep understanding of its target customers.”
To the Moon & Beyond
Finally, EMC announced a Atmos enhancements designed to allow the biggest of Big-Data customers to manage a 100-petabyte cloud as a single system across distributed sites, with obligatory performance improvements.
You know, if you stacked Quad Density, 720K, 5.25-inch floppy disks, at about six disks per inch, a 100-petabyte stack would reach far beyond the moon…seriously.
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