EMC Goes ‘Wild’ with Cloud and Big Data Strategy

Enterprise Storage Forum content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

EMC gone wild?

It seemed so at this week’s EMC World in Las Vegas. As well as releasing a ton of new products which will be covered below, the company has taken to animalistic monikers for some of its initiatives, such as “ViPR” for its software-defined storage platform and “HAWQ” for its Hadoop workload query technology.

Probably the biggest news out of the show is what appears to be a major play to develop a new platform or operating system (OS) to run the cloud under EMC’s Pivotal brand. The Pivotal platform, said Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz, will sit on top of the cloud, Hadoop data stores and the software defined data center to deal with big data storage and analytics. His sees this as an OS-like platform that all aspects of the infrastructure will harness.

“Pivotal is a huge opportunity to drive value from the cloud and big data,” said Maritz. “It will facilitate storage and reasoning over very large amounts of data cost effectively, rapid and automated application development, and the ability to deal with fast data—which will be needed as telemetry is added into all devices which need real time analysis of data as it comes in.”

Isilon NAS File System

EMC Isilon’s OneFS scale-out NAS OS has been updated to raise efficiency and support cloud, analytics and mobile applications. In keeping with the theme of the show, it integrates with ViPR for access to object storage, Amazon S3 and EMC Atmos. Hadoop HDFS 2.0 integration is coming soon as a way to enable big data analytics, as is support for Pivotal.

“Post process deduplication has been added to OneFS, as well as audit security features,” noted Sam Grocott, VP of Marketing & Product Management, EMC Isilon. “It also integrates with Syncplicity online file sharing.”

Syncplicity

The Syncplicity release at the show offers a policy-based approach to controlling where files are stored in the cloud. EMC also announced integration with the ViPR software-defined storage platform and a plan to support EMC VNX. (Syncplicity currently supports EMC Isilon and Atmos.)

“Syncplicity makes it possible to set up DropBox-like capabilities to mobile users without having the data itself moved out of enterprise control,” said Grocott. “The data will be fed to the device but will remain on the premises.”

Data Protection Suite

EMC has been working for years to unite data protection elements such as Data Domain, Avamar and EMC Networker. The EMC Data Protection Suite is the latest wave of this integration, which is said to simplify the acquisition, implementation and use of those EMC backup and archiving offerings. This includes a flexible licensing model which gives users access to all capabilities rather than having to size and price individual components. You can purchase based on consumption.

Documentum Content Management

EMC released a host of Documentum tweaks this week at its annual show. The company has updated Documentum to run in the cloud.

Further, a new EMC Documentum Enterprise Migration Appliance is said to reduce migration time by 90% and migration cost by 50%, while cutting deployment times from months to a few days.

In addition, features have been released for users in the Energy, Life Sciences and Healthcare industries to deal with their specific information management challenges. This includes general availability of EMC Documentum Asset Operations, EMC Documentum Electronic Trial Master File, EMC Documentum Quality and Manufacturing, and EMC Healthcare Integration Portfolio.

IT Visibility

A new EMC Service Assurance Suite and an updated EMC Storage Resource Management Suite are said to provide complete visibility into IT environments to identify how resources are being consumed and whether SLAs are being met. This also is tied into ViPR and the software-defined data center.

Drew Robb
Drew Robb
Drew Robb is a contributing writer for Datamation, Enterprise Storage Forum, eSecurity Planet, Channel Insider, and eWeek. He has been reporting on all areas of IT for more than 25 years. He has a degree from the University of Strathclyde UK (USUK), and lives in the Tampa Bay area of Florida.

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Cloud Insider for top news, trends, and analysis.

Latest Articles

15 Software Defined Storage Best Practices

Software Defined Storage (SDS) enables the use of commodity storage hardware. Learn 15 best practices for SDS implementation.

What is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)?

Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE) is the encapsulation and transmission of Fibre Channel (FC) frames over enhanced Ethernet networks, combining the advantages of Ethernet...

9 Types of Computer Memory Defined (With Use Cases)

Computer memory is a term for all of the types of data storage technology that a computer may use. Learn more about the X types of computer memory.