At the forefront of EMC’s culture is a mindset of putting customers first – it’s with this mindset that we develop our products. Today’s announcement on the general availability of EMC Isilon OneFS 7.1 is a prime example of a product developed primarily on feedback by our customers. I recently spoke to several OneFS 7.1 beta customers and partners about the product and the consensus is: two thumbs up.
The first customer I spoke to was VTM LLC, a video-based solutions company that is looking for scale-out storage solutions to help meet their HIPAA compliance, data security and high-performance storage needs. OneFS’s encryption, scalability and the variety of drive types included in OneFS 7.1 were among the things that really resonated with VTM. Robert Jackson, Network Administrator at VTM, told me, “OneFS 7.1 can help VTM meet our business needs by allowing us to grow our storage exponentially, as storage demands grow. This also allows us to assure our customers that their data is safe, encrypted and available for long-term access thanks to added support for Data at Rest Encryption using self-encrypting drives.”
Integration Logistics, a division of Protection 1, a full service security company protecting residential, business, national account and integrated system customers, also participated in the beta test program and was impressed with the improved manageability of OneFS 7.1. Morgan Harris, Computer Operations Manager at Protection 1, said, “Not only is the addition of self- encrypted drives to OneFS 7.1 a huge benefit, the setup and manageability was easy and the power of the device is phenomenal.” We couldn’t agree more.
We’re also hearing a wave of positive feedback from our channel partners. Systems integrator World Wide Technology, Inc. (WWT) provides technology products, services and supply chain solutions that help customers evaluate, architect and implement technology. Bob Olwig, WWT’s VP for Business Development and Innovation, said, “The folks at EMC really hit a home run with OneFS 7.1.Many of our customers are concerned with finding ways to increase their data security, meet regulatory requirements and increase manageability and interoperability. OneFS 7.1 addresses all of these challenges and offers the simplicity, incredible scalability and efficiency that our customers need.”
Another partner, Sovereign Systems, enables companies to build, deploy and extend their private and hybrid clouds, and expressed a lot of excitement around OneFS 7.1, Jonathan Kowall, Director of Storage Practice & Principal Architect, said, “SmartDedupe will provide our customers with the ability to substantially reduce their physical data footprint by locating and sharing common elements across files. In the end, this will help them improve TCO by reducing their cost per terabyte, increase storage density and realize greater power efficiency.” We were thrilled to know this is the case, and that their customers are benefitting from the new OneFS.
These are just a few of the reasons why OneFS 7.1 is so exciting for our customers and partners – we’ll be sure to share more soon. You can learn more about OneFS 7.1 from a technical standpoint by checking out the blog post.
