EMC unveils new products to address tech megatrends

By Goh Thean Eu July 10, 2014

New releases aimed at helping organisations 'Redefine Possible'
The four megatrends: Mobility, cloud, big data and social media

EMC unveils new products to address tech megatrends

STORAGE systems maker EMC Corp has announced a series of new products that aim to help organisations to better prepare for technology megatrends.

According to EMC Asia Pacific and Japan president David Webster (pic), companies today are expected to see their businesses and operations impacted by four megatrends: Mobility, cloud, big data and social media.

“We see industries transforming because of these four megatrends,” he said in his keynote address at the EMC Forum and MegaLaunch in Seoul on Wednesday (July 9).

As part of its efforts to help customers be better prepared for these megatrends -- which is also part EMC's growth strategy -- the company announced new products across different portfolios, including enterprise storage, flash storage and scale-out network-attached storage.

“Ultimately, we hope that these releases will help companies redefine their businesses, as they accelerate their journey to the hybrid cloud,.” said Webster

Introducing VMAX

Among these announcements was its high-end storage solution VMAX^{3, to be}be available in September, which EMC claimed is the industry’s first open enterprise data service platform.

VMAX³ is able to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by 50%, and has up to three times the performance of previous generations. It runs on the Hypermax operating system (OS), on top of Dynamic Virtual Matrix architecture.

EMC claimed that Hypermax is the industry’s first open converged storage hypervisor and OS, allowing VMAX³ to embed storage infrastructure services like cloud access, data mobility and data protection directly on the array.

The OS delivers new levels of data centre efficiency and consolidation by reducing footprint and energy requirements, while the Dynamic Virtual Matrix architecture enables customers to dynamically allocate processing power for improved performance and to ensure predictable service levels at scale, the company said.

“The rearchitecting of VMAX³ – from enterprise storage to an open enterprise data service platform – gives customers the ability to transform a traditional storage infrastructure to an agile data centre infrastructure. Simply put, it’s hyper-consolidation for existing workloads and their underlying infrastructure," said Brian Gallagher, president of EMC's enterprise and midrange systems division.

“As the first open enterprise data service platform, VMAX³ is the foundation for hybrid cloud as customers look to deliver storage-as-a-service with simple, policy-based service levels,” he added.

Isilon moves

EMC's Isilon storage division also announced upgrades to its OneFS OS; two new platforms (the S210 and X410); and also unveiled new big data analytics solutions.

OneFS 7.7.1 includes SmartFlash, a flash-based cache that allows customers to retrieve data faster, and can scale up to one petabyte in a single cluster. This version works on the new Isilon storage systems as well as earlier generations.

Meanwhile, the Isilon S210 can run up to 3.75 million IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) per cluster and provides flexible configuration and deployment, while the Isilon X410 offers a 70% increase in throughput at 33% less cost for each megabit per second.

“Today, one of the biggest storage challenges for companies is the growth of unstructured data by traditional and next-gen applications," said Nick Kirsch, vice president and chief technology officer of EMC's Isilon Storage division.

"The rollout of the new EMC Isilon software, platforms and solutions are designed to help our customers address these challenges while driving faster time to result and reducing costs,” he added.

XtremIO 3.0 all-flash arrays

EMC also announced new features, configurations, ecosystem integrations and business programmes for its XtremIO all-flash arrays.

According to Andy Fenselau, senior director product of marketing for XtremIO, the new XtremIO 3.0 software code for existing XtremIO arrays is free and will be available sometime this quarter. The new software expected to help companies to see significant gains in security, capacity, performance and functionality.

He added that the all-flash array now also comes with a new entry-level configuration – new Starter X-Brick. With this, customers can jump onto the all-flash array bandwagon via a 5TB (terabyte) configuration, instead of 10TB (with the One X-Brick).

The all-flash array also now supports up to six 20TB X-Bricks with 12 active controllers, enabling a 50% IOPS performance increase and 50% more capacity.

Fenselau said that the all-flash array also comes with a snapshot technology that he claimed was space-efficient for both data and metadata.

“With the industry’s first writeable snapshot technology, engineers are able to do high-performance analytics and reporting copies without any brute force data movement, and deliver near CDP capabilities for data protection,” he said.

CDP (continuous data protection) is also called continuous backup or real-time backup, which involves automatically saving a copy of every change made to data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user saves.