EMC has announced major new platforms and enhancements that span the portfolio of EMC XtremIO, EMC VMAX3, VCE, EMC VN, EMC Data Domain and EMC Data Protection Suite products.
At the EMC World 2015 conference in Las Vegas, the overriding theme is that the world is going through unprecedented transformation and by 2020, more than seven billion people will connect to the Internet using 30 billion devices.
With people, businesses and things communicating, transacting and negotiating with each other, Jeremy Burton, President, Products and Marketing, EMC believes the result is a new world of digital business emerging.
For Burton, addressing a jam-packed audience, it promises to disrupt existing business models - even those born of the Internet and e-business eras.
The world is increasingly a community of digital citizens engaging in a global network, always connected with the world’s information in the palm of their hand, living smarter more informed lives.
Consequently, Burton believes this is resetting the expectations they have of the businesses they deal with.
They expect faster more personalised digital experiences, and 24x7 access on all devices. To embrace this disruption and be prepared, organisations need to redefine themselves and adopt a digital mindset.
“Business leaders across every industry are redefining their business models to meet customers online, engage through mobile devices and enable applications that are far more capable, intelligent and accessible,” says Jeremy Burton, President, Products and Marketing, EMC.
“IT must transform, but a large part of their investment is tied up in legacy infrastructure and applications. It’s a tale of two worlds and they must coexist.
“EMC is leading our customers in this transformation by helping them optimise today’s data centre so they can achieve efficiencies that lower cost and increase service levels to help ensure highly-available, always-on access to applications and data.”
For Burton, the challenge this presents for CIOs is twofold.
First they must start by driving out cost from existing IT without compromising service levels, while secondly using those savings to deliver new, transformative applications optimised for the digital world.
As a result, EMC is introducing major updates to its industry-leading XtremIO all-flash array and the VMAX3 Enterprise Data Service Platform.
According to Burton, both products deliver automation and data service capabilities, but have been specifically designed to reduce management overhead, reducing the amount of time required to do common tasks from hours to minutes, or eliminating them altogether.
Furthermore, VCE is announcing a new family of Hyper-Converged RackScale Systems that enable enterprises and Service Providers to simplify the deployment of next-generation scale-out Mobile, Cloud and distributed Tier 2 applications.
Burton says the VxRack System enables customers to start from dozens of servers and scaling to many thousands of servers - tens of petabytes of storage capacity while providing the highest performance and $/IOPS.
Most importantly for Burton, VCE brings its “proven methodology” of pre-engineered factory built infrastructure with single call life cycle support to deliver a massively scaled out Hyper-Converged VxRack with the same unmatched VCE customer experience.
Software-Defined Storage
In addition, for those IT organisations looking to Software-Defined Storage to provide agility and flexibility for their development and operational (DevOps) environments, EMC is announcing general availability of the first fully virtualised EMC VNXe software stack (formerly known as Project Liberty).
Speaking to Reseller News, Burton says the EMC vVNX Community Edition software stack is designed to provide customers with the ability to create test and development environments based on VNXe storage without a dedicated storage hardware system and stand up multiple virtual VNXe instances cost effectively, using industry-standard server hardware.
Additionally for the VNX family, EMC is releasing a new VNXe3200 all-flash variant, which will be sold through EMC’s Business Partner Program network.
Hybrid Cloud
Burton sys EMC has optimised its products to deliver cloud capabilities across its portfolio, enabling customers to leverage public, private and hybrid cloud as a low-cost and flexible storage and data protection tier.
The knock-on effect is that the company is extending this further with the launch of EMC CloudBoost and EMC CloudArray software.
Burton says the new CloudArray software enables tiering to cloud or object storage from the VMAX3 platform, lowering TCO by moving data to lower-cost storage.
“Whether used for backup and archive, file or secondary data, CloudArray technology ensures rapid accessibility allowing EMC customers to take full advantage of the cloud’s greater scalability, lower costs and reduced maintenance,” he adds.
With the updates to the Data Protection Suite, Burton says CloudBoost enhancements are also designed to enable EMC Avamar and EMC Networker customers to better protect data on EMC and third-party cloud services, with the tools they already use.
But as businesses accelerate their use and development of next-gen, cloud-enabled applications, Burton accepts that they have struggled to protect data across what has become the hyper-extended enterprise.
As part of its ongoing strategy to protect data wherever it resides, Burton adds that EMC is also introducing a variety of new data protection products and product enhancements including new back-up appliances, cloud-enablement of data protection.
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