EMC World 2014 Recap

EMC World 2014, EMC Corporation’s annual conference, was held once again in Las Vegas during the week of May 5. It served as a fantastic opportunity for EMC to share their latest technical and business offerings with EMC customers, business partners and IT professionals.

In case you were unable to attend or follow along virtually, we’d like to take a moment to share some highlights from 4 days of incredible content: 

ViPR 2.0:

EMC announced several significant updates to their software-defined storage (SDS) platform, EMC ViPR 2.0. ViPR offers a revolutionary approach to storage automation and management to transform existing heterogeneous physical storage into a simple, extensible and open virtual storage platform. ViPR abstracts storage from physical arrays into a single pool of virtual storage, allowing administrators to manage their storage with the same benefits they have with compute and network via VMware and other 3rd party virtualization technologies.

  • ViPR 2.0 includes object-based storage services with support for Amazon S3, Atmos and Centera CAS API Support. ViPR also supports HDFS (available with ViPR 1.0).
  • ViPR 2.0 has added block storage services when coupled with ScaleIO as well as Open Stack Cinder support.
  • ViPR 2.0 has included support for EMC geo-distributed technologies like RecoverPoint and VPLEX.
  • ViPR 2.0 will extended native array support (ViPR 1.0 supported EMC VNX, VMAX, Isilon and NetApp FAS) to include EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, ScaleIO, Hitachi, HP SL4540 and VCE VBlock.
  • ViPR 2.0 Availability slated for GA in Q2. Learn more about EMC ViPR HERE. 

ScaleIO 1.3:

EMC ScaleIO is software that creates a server-based SAN from local storage to deliver elastic and scalable performance and capacity on demand. ScaleIO converges storage compute resources, scaling to thousands of nodes. ScaleIO is analogous to VMware’s VSAN solution that can be applied to non-VMware use cases. As an alternative to traditional SAN infrastructure, ScaleIO combines spinning HDDs, SSDs, and PCIe flash cards from server nodes to create a virtual pool of block storage.

  • ScaleIO 1.3 makes it easier to add and remove storage resources from ScaleIO clusters.
  • ScaleIO 1.3 improves data protection capabilities by utilizing a two-copy mirror for chunks of data.
  • ScaleIO 1.3 is now supported by the ViPR 2.0 controller! (See Elastic Cloud Storage below)
  • ScaleIO 1.3 Availability slated for GA in Q2. Learn more about EMC ScaleIO HERE. 

Elastic Cloud Storage:

EMC’s first announced Project Nile in September 2013. The goal of Project Nile was to give IT departments and Service Providers the ability to deliver easily consumable storage services, similar to those offered by the Public Cloud providers. Fast forward to EMC World 2014 where Project Nile was formally announced as EMC’s Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) Appliance.

The ECS Appliance, bundled with ScaleIO 1.3, ViPR 2.0 and commodity hardware, is the world’s first commercially available complete hyperscale storage infrastructure for the data center. ECS will provide object, HDFS and block services in an appliance when, run internally, is 28% cheaper than public cloud alternatives from Amazon and Google. Continue HERE for more information. 

Hybrid Cloud Solution:

EMC announced the Hybrid Cloud Solution, redefining how IT organizations can get the most value from private and public clouds. The Hybrid Cloud Solution includes technologies from across EMC. The new solution is based on a Software-Defined Data Center architecture: EMC storage and data protection, Pivotal Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a- service (PaaS) and the Pivotal Big Data Suite, VMware cloud management and virtualization solutions, and VMware vCloud Hybrid Service. Learn more about EMC’s Hybrid Cloud Solution HERE. 

DSSD Acquisition:

EMC also announced their latest acquisition: flash start-up DSSD. While no formal products were unveiled, it is anticipated that we’ll see a rack-scale server-side flash storage solution to support emerging Big Data workloads. To read more about the DSSD acquisition, continue HERE. 

XtremIO Challenge:

EMC announced the XtremIO $1 Million Guarantee. Essentially, anyone who can demonstrate that their workload can compromise the XtremIO system’s inline data services will be rewarded $1M! Learn more about this guarantee HERE. 

VNXe 3200:

EMC announced the availability of the VNXe 3200, a new addition to their entry-level line of storage arrays, just prior to EMC World 2014 but we felt it was worth noting here.

  • The VNXe 3200 is truly unified, supporting block (iSCSI and FC) and file (CIFS, NFS) natively from the storage controller.
  • The VNXe 3200, which includes the MCx (Multi-Core Optimization) code enabling 3x performance improvements vs legacy VNXe models, now supports both Fast Cache and Fast VP (Fully-Automated Storage Tiering).
  • The VNXe 3200 can be deployed along with the virtual edition of EMC VPLEX via iSCSI protocol, enabling active-active datacenters and VMWare stretched clusters.
  • The VNXe supports 50 drives at launch, expected to increase to 150.

To learn more about the new VNXe 3200, continue HERE. 

Project Liberty:

EMC has also announced Project Liberty. Essentially, Project Liberty (not formally a product yet), will be virtualized storage software based on VNX. Think vVNX. Expect to hear more details of this exciting development in the near future. 

Data Domain 2200:

EMC announced the availability of a new model to its Data Domain line of purpose-built backup appliances, the DD2200!

  • The DD2200 is available in 7-drive or 12-drive system which supports 7.5 TB and 17.2 TB usable physical capacities respectively. (172 TB – 860 TB logical capacity)
  • The DD2200 can handle 3.5 TB/hr of backup throughput (4.7 TB leveraging DD Boost) 

Continue HERE to learn more about the new DD2200.

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