EMC World 2016 (updated) Part 2 - Ben's top 5
With another EMC World behind us, it's time to talk announcements!
First, let's get this out of the way... What's the word on the new company? [drumroll]
While the name may lack originality, there were plenty of assurances that Dell Technologies will be a better, stronger company, bringing together the best EMC and Dell have to offer. And before you could say 'Flash' we were off and running, talking about new products and projects. To keep it concise, I'm going to stick to my top five announcements (Part 1 already covered Unity). OK, here goes!
#5 MyService360
You could argue that technology between top-tier vendors isn't what differentiates them. Many of these companies have great products. When we talk to customers about companies like EMC and Cisco we love to talk about Service and Support. MyService360 is a next-gen online portal that promises to expand visibility to your datacenter, decrease risk and lessen the time it takes to solve problems. Built on top of Vblocks, Isilons and Pivotal technology, the new portal allows you to visualize all of your EMC platforms, see your service activities / SRs, and even displays device warnings and performance data... All from a single pane of glass!
#4 Software Updates Galore!
There were quite a few software updates recently released to already great products, but these are two of my favorites. ScaleIO 2.0 brings enhanced security, resiliency, and extended platform support to EMC's killer Software-defined storage stack. For those of you un-aware, ScaleIO is software that brings pay-as-you-grow storage with insanely linear performance using commodity hardware. The 2.0 update brings IPv6, AD/LDAP support, better data and system integrity, caching options, better OpenStack support and an improved GUI (which was already stellar). A little birdy told me compression and encryption are on the roadmap.
EMC also released Isilon OneFS 8.0 and introduced IslionSD Edge. 8.0 brings non-disruptive upgrades and rollbacks, a long awaited feature. Isilon also now supports SMB3 persistent connections, NFSV4 failover, File filtering options and more. The two most exciting additions, however, are Cloud Pools and IsilonSD Edge. CloudPools allows the use of off-cluster storage as an additional data tier. CloudPools supports a variety of off-cluster storage such as another Isilon cluster, EMC (ECS), Amazon S3 and Azure. Cool, right? IsilonSD Edge is a software version of Isilon that allows you to run 3-6 nodes in appliance form and scales up to 36TB. Think ROBO!
#3 Project Nitro
Yep. That's an All Flash Isilon pictured above. Surprised? Everyone was, but it makes perfect sense considering what Isilon does and who it's targeted to. Then when you consider that we could be looking at 15TB SSDs by 2017, doing Scale-out NAS on All Flash is pretty brilliant. What can it do? 1.5TB/s of throughput, 400+ nodes, 100 Petabytes. Plus all the things customers love about Isilon: snapshots, SyncIQ, Cloud Pools, (SMB 3.x, NFS v3/v4, HDFS, Object interfaces). This thing is a beast and more over, it's based on the most mature Scale-out file platform out there.
#2 Data Domain VE
OK, so this one was announced just before the event, but it seemed to go mostly unnoticed. DataDoman Virtual Edition. I have one word for you to get the juices flowing (well, technically it's an acronym), ROBO. This little VM supports up to 16TB of storage and leverages some of the best deduplication software out there. Want to protect a branch office and replicate to a central Data Domain, boom. DD Replicator and DD Boost are there. Obviously, they're not targeting a Vblock, but how about a hyper-converged stack? Perhaps with Virtualized backup (dare I mention DD Boost-friendy Veeam)? And now virtualized DeDupe? That's compelling stuff. And since we're throwing around acronyms and compounds, I've got one more for you... multi-tenant. Think about it, you could go out and buy a massive DD... OR (now) spin up a dedicated DDVE per tenant. Pretty cool.
#1 New Additions from VCE
While Unity was probably my favorite announcement at EMC World, what's better than taking all these new products and fitting them into lab-tested, converged stacks, ready for workloads? That's where VCE continues to shine. Say what you will about competition and conflict between these companies, VCE continues to crush it in the converged and now hyper-converged space. So what's new? How about Vblock and VxBlock 350 systems with Unity for starters. This is a mid-range All Flash monster. What if 300k IOPs doesn't get it done? Step right up to the 540 XtremIO option. OK, but what if sub-1ms latency doesn't cut it? 1) You're crazy 2) That's OK, meet the All Flash VMAX 740 option. Oh and coming soon is support for EMC's DSSD D5. How does 10M IOPS, ~100 microsecond latency, 100GB/s of bandwidth and 144TBs of raw storage in five rack units sound? Good? I thought so.
How about some extreme scale with multi-hypervisor support? Meet VxRack System 1000 with FLEX Nodes. Ideal for organizations that need a flexible foundation for delivering IaaS at scale. EMC's ScaleIO allow scale up to 1000+ nodes by virtualizing a server’s direct-attached storage into a shared storage pool. Speaking of VxRack, the VxRack System 1000 is now also available with SDDC Nodes leveraging VMware's EVO platform. This is ideal for organizations that have standardized on VMware and want a turnkey private cloud with end-to-end system automation. So VxRack can give us Scale-out IaaS and turnkey private cloud, what about Cloud Native? Meet the VxRack with Neutrino nodes. Again the focus is on delivering a turnkey IaaS solution, one that is 100% focused on supporting new Cloud Native apps. It’s designed for elasticity, simplicity, scalability. Built on open-source technologies and designed to run open-source software stacks, this is true Native Hybrid Cloud platform.
Hope you enjoyed the list. As always, reach out to me and the R2 Team for more info. Until next time.