No company is immune to "the single-most transformative IT shift ever", caused by the proliferation of devices and applications, storage specialist EMC warned.
The stark comments came on the opening day of EMC World in Las Vegas on May 5. In an opening keynote speech the firm announced major new software-defined storage products and technologies that could enable the blended benefits of a public and private cloud, delivering Service Providers and customers, in any industry and of any size, with the efficiency, agility, security and control of a hybrid cloud.
The 3rd Platform of IT is based on the mega trends of cloud, mobile, social and Big Data and is creating a new world of opportunity – and competitive threat – for businesses in every industry. New mobile applications are delivering unique and frictionless experiences for customers both to interact and transact. These applications serve hundreds to millions of users and generate 1000x the amount of information as their predecessors.
This is leading to organisations redefining themselves with software and transforming data centres into fully virtualised and automated private clouds, while also running certain applications in a public cloud. When combined together, they form a hybrid cloud — where almost all applications will live to make IT more efficient and agile and cost-effective. Suggesting a significant move toward adoption of a hybrid cloud model, last week the Economist Intelligence Unit published a report which found that 63% of business executives plan to increase reliance on corporate IT to deliver both internal and external IT resources.
To help customers navigate arguably the biggest transformational shift the IT industry has ever seen, EMC is delivering new Software-Defined Storage products to help organisations manage their traditional enterprise applications; deploy next-generation applications faster, with new levels of efficiency and speed; and convert new sources of data insight into new revenue streams.
David Goulden, CEO, EMC Information Infrastructure, said: "The industry is navigating the single-most transformative IT shift ever. It’s driven by billions of devices, billions of users and millions of applications. Not a single industry or organisation is immune to this sweeping change.
"The priority for customers today is to drive competitive advantage by harnessing the forces of mobile, social, cloud and Big Data, while maximising existing investments that support traditional enterprise workloads. The Hybrid cloud model allows customers to run applications easily and cost-effectively inside or outside of their data centres, and today’s Software-Defined products make this possible."
New Product Highlights
* New EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) Appliance (formerly known as "Project Nile") is a breakthrough hyperscale cloud storage infrastructure that redefines the economic benefits of cloud storage for service providers and customers of any size, in any industry. ECS Appliance delivers the ease-of-use, agility and cost benefits of public cloud, with the control and security of an on-premise private cloud. The ECS Appliance offers up to 28% lower TCO than public cloud alternatives from Amazon and Google. (News release here)
* New version of the EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform – EMC ViPR 2.0 -delivers new capabilities that simplify the management of both existing and new storage infrastructures, and provides new data services to underpin next-generation applications and Big Data analytics. ViPR 2.0 builds a bridge to the 3rd Platform of IT by enabling customers to manage their storage infrastructure in a consistent, fully automated way. ViPR also plugs into higher-level management and orchestration tools from VMware, OpenStack and Microsoft so storage can be a part of broader data center workflows. ViPR 2.0 adds new block data Services and new geographic replication and distribution. It also provides support for commodity drives and additional 3rd-party arrays through OpenStack.
* The new EMC Data Domain DD2200 delivers a protection storage system with enterprise-class benefits that’s been specifically designed, priced and optimised for midmarket customers. By delivering the DD2200 through EMC’s global network of channel partners, EMC is helping to ensure successful implementations for its midmarket customers, who can also implement it via new VSPEX solutions.
* Last week EMC introduced new products and capabilities to the industry-leading VNX Family of hybrid storage solutions, including a new entry-level VNXe3200 storage array which is 3X more efficient than previous VNXe solutions, and is based on the VNX Series (launched in September 2013). EMC also announced ‘Project Liberty’, a Software-Defined VNX that leverages the functionality and user experience of VNX, while delivering new levels of freedom to deploy applications with cloud-like agility in a software-defined data center. EMC also added EMC D@RE (Data-At-Rest-Encryption) to the VNX Series, providing the capability to encrypt data written to disk and eliminate data access from unauthorised drive removal.
