Today was a very big day for EMC. We not only launched all-new midrange VNX storage and software that we believe is far superior to anything else in the market, but we also announced that the EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform is planned to be generally available later this month. There was also a surprise “reveal” onstage for those that joined us in Milan where we provided a live technology preview of what EMC is calling “Project Nile”.
Project Nile will give IT departments or Service Providers the ability to deliver easily consumable storage services, similar to those offered by the Web scale Public Cloud providers, but with the control security and reliability of a Private Cloud.
We all know that data storage requirements are growing exponentially. To put this in perspective, in its first 26 years, EMC shipped a total of one Exabyte of storage. This year, during our second quarter, we shipped one Exabyte in a month. The complexities of managing data growing at this rate are extreme and our customers are asking us to help them manage not just complexity, but also cost, by delivering very simple to consume storage on a vast scale.
Many of our customers like the ease of use and underlying architecture of the Public Cloud for a growing portion of their storage needs, but are thwarted by the risks related to sending their intellectual property off-premise and total cost of ownership concerns at scale. Project Nile has been designed to deliver that Public Cloud ease-of-use and underlying architecture while eradicating the pain points of security and cost of ownership.
So what are the key elements currently planned for Project Nile?
- Project Nile will be designed to deliver a streamlined and highly automated user experience from purchase thorough deployment and consumption.
- Project Nile will be engineered to enable “Click and Go” access to block, file and object storage depending on a customer’s workload needs. AND it possesses all the benefits of the Public Cloud by being designed for massive scale, geo-distribution, and elasticity.
- Project Nile is intended to support multiple standard APIs including Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), OpenStack Swift, HDFS and EMC Atmos. This means that it will help developers more easily move applications between on-premise and Public Cloud environments without the need for costly and time-consuming application rewrites.
- Finally, Project Nile will be offered at a very aggressive price point, redefining the economics of on-premise Web-scale storage deployments.
Simply put we expect that Project Nile will be the first commercially available, complete, Web scale storage infrastructure for the data center.
The big question I’m sure you all have now is, “When can I get my hands on Project Nile?” Well, we expect Project Nile to be introduced to the market in the first half of next year!