EMC Unleashes its Next Wave in Storage Tech

At the eve of the Formula One in Monza (F1 circuit on the outskirts of Milan), EMC announced new technologies and upgradations to its line of storage products for the mid-range to large enterprises. These products are meant to speed up the IT transformation for today's enterprise to take advantage of the ‘3rd platform' in IT---Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, and Social. They announced tech advances to the VNX line of midrange storage, new capabilities for the storage architecture -VSPEX, the upcoming general availability of EMC ViPR - a new Software-Defined Storage platform, and a preview of "Project Nile" - which EMC expects to be the world's first commercially-available Web-scale storage infrastructure for the data center.

"Customers are demanding more performance and efficiency from their current data center infrastructure while, at the same time, exploring new architectures for their next generation mobile and Web applications. By fully embracing and exploiting disruptive technologies such as Intel MultiCore, virtualization and flash, EMC is providing customers with the products and solutions they need to help transform their IT department."

---EMC President and Chief Operating Officer, David Goulden

ViPR-the software-defined storage platform

Using ViPR, customers can manage both their existing storage infrastructure (using the ViPR Controller) and the data residing within it (using ViPR Data Services), enabling them to help drive improvements in automation. ViPR will deliver Object Data Services that offer support for multiple standard APIs including Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift and Atmos in addition to giving customers the ability to view objects as files, providing near-file access performance without the latency inherent in current object storage models. ViPR Object Data Services are engineered to be deployed on any ViPR-supported file storage including the new EMC VNX unified storage platform as well existing EMC VNX, EMC Isilon and third-party arrays including NetApp storage. Future updates will be designed to add support for additional third-party arrays as well as commodity hardware. This strategy of broad platform support and open extensibility means that customers can benefit from simplified management of their entire storage infrastructure with the freedom to choose the underlying platforms that are most appropriate for their particular workloads.

VNX-unified storage systems

The VNX Series leverages Intel's Sandy Bridge technology and features new MCx (multi-core optimization) software that is flash optimized and accelerates the performance of virtualized applications. It is designed to address the high-performance, low-latency requirements of virtualized applications, which is the most common use case for midrange solutions. MCx software takes full advantage of Intel's multi-core processing technology to optimize flash by distributing all VNX data services across all cores (up-to 32). Typically only a few flash drives (on average less than 5% of the total capacity) are needed to optimize performance for virtualized applications. With the new VNX Series, customers can reduce capacity requirements with new fixed block deduplication. This is ideal for virtual machines, virtual desktops, and other environments with redundant data across multiple sources. The new Unisphere Management Suite is designed to centrally manage up-to thousands of VNX/VNXe systems and servers with XtremSW Cache and also includes powerful monitoring and reporting capabilities for validating performance and capacity requirements.

Enhanced VSPEX infrastructure for VNX systems

VSPEX infrastructure portfolio has been enhanced to leverage the new EMC VNX systems and a range of new data protection capabilities across 18 existing and 4 new VSPEX configurations. The performance of VSPEX has now been further enhanced with the inclusion of the new VNX 5400, 5600 and 5800 Series as part of the solution designed to enable support of up to 1000 virtual machines, 2x more than ever before for VSPEX workloads at twice the value. These new VSPEX configurations powered by VNX further speed transformation to the cloud by driving simplicity and offering more VMs per system.

Project Nile--web-scale storage infrastructure for the data center

The data storage requirements are growing exponentially. The complexities of managing such huge amounts of data have led customers to demand simple to use consumer storage on a vast scale but at a competitive cost.

Project Nile is conceptualized to give IT departments or Service Providers the ability to deliver easily consumable storage services, similar to those offered by the Web scale Public Cloud providers, but with the control security and reliability of a Private Cloud. It will be engineered to enable "Click and Go" access to block, file and object storage depending on a customer's workload needs and possesses the Public Cloud benefits by being designed for massive scale, geo-distribution, and elasticity. It is intended to support multiple standard APIs including Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), OpenStack Swift, HDFS and EMC Atmos. This means that it will help developers more easily move applications between on-premise and Public Cloud environments without the need for costly and time-consuming application rewrites.