Two mega trends in the world of IT are converging in new and quite powerful ways.
First, the storage market is abuzz about Software-Defined Storage, what it means, and who offers it. In parallel, companies lacking the resources to manage growing volumes of data on their own — or simply because it’s easier than dealing with their IT department — have been turning, by default, to Public Cloud services. With today’s announcements, our customers now have an alternative path.
Today we introduce EMC Elastic Cloud Storage ECS Appliance, formerly known as “Project Nile,” a potent combination of commodity hardware and intelligent software designed to help customers capitalize on the potential of the 3rd Platform.
EMC ECS Appliance, powered by EMC ViPR 2.0, is the world’s first commercially available hyperscale storage infrastructure designed for the data center. It redefines storage economics and provides all the benefits of public cloud with effortless control, making it easy for businesses to grow to Petabyte or Exabyte scale. EMC ECS Appliance provides the benefits of the public cloud (cost, simplicity, scalability) without the risk by making Private Clouds accessible and affordable. The security and control inherent to private clouds or internal IT departments is now available to any company regardless of size or budget with this new appliance.
EMC ECS Appliance features include:
- Universal protocol support in a single platform with support for block, object, and HDFS
- Single management view across multiple types of infrastructures
- Multi-site, active-active architecture with a single global namespace enabling the management of a geographically distributed environment as a single logical resource using metadata-driven policies to distribute and protect content, and
- Multi-tenancy support, detailed metering, and an intuitive self-service portal, as well as billing integration.
EMC ViPR is the “secret sauce” for EMC ECS Appliance. We have made significant upgrades since releasing ViPR 1.0 just over six months ago—and our customers have made significant progress.
Next month, ViPR 2.0 will be generally available, offering even more functionality. One of the biggest components of the ViPR 2.0 release is support for commodity hardware. This commodity support means that ViPR now provides data services like block, object, and HDFS with built in protection, directly on off-the-shelf commodity hardware. Commodity support is something that our customers have been asking us for and talking about for quite some time, and we are delighted to deliver as a direct result of their feedback.
Other key features of ViPR 2.0 include:
- Consistent data reliability and security across entire data center
- Native array support for HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) and third-party plug-ins (e.g., Cinder) that enable support for numerous non — EMC vendor platforms
- Seamless integration with Centera and support for the CAS API, which is part of our Object Data Service
- Geo-distribution and protection
- Multi-tenancy support, detailed metering, an intuitive self-service portal, and billing integration.
These new features will allow customers to extend automation capabilities to deliver improved efficiencies across their storage environments. This, in turn, allows them to better control OPEX as data growth continues to rise at unprecedented rates — one of the key pain points our customers talk about.
To help put this data growth in context, the Digital Universe is growing 40% yearly into the next decade. By 2020, it will contain as many digital bits as there are stars in the universe. And this vast amount of data makes storing, accessing and managing all this data really, really hard, not to mention expensive. The way customers distribute and protect their data at scale today will play a very important role in how successful they are in the future. With ViPR 2.0, we’ve added enhanced geo-distribution and protection capabilities superior to anything the industry has seen so far.
There’s an enormous opportunity ahead of us, one that will dynamically change the face of technology, and our customers are with us on the ground floor. EMC is here to work with customers to make sure they have the right technology in place for the right job, along with the right people and process to redefine their businesses today and tomorrow.
