EMC World: EMC And Friends Roll Out Massive Product Launch

EMC World And The Power Of The Big Product Launch

A big feature of the annual EMC World 2012 conference, held this week in Las Vegas, was a massive introduction of new storage hardware and software products from EMC and its partners.

EMC's huge launch, dubbed by the company as "Mega Launch II," includes over 40 new products, making it easily the largest product launch since EMC's original "Mega Launch" of 40-plus products early last year. Adding to the fun were product launches from several of EMC's vendor partners.

Turn the page and get a close look at one of the busiest weeks ever in storage product history.

EMC Expands VMAX, Adds Virtual Pooling Of Non-EMC Storage

EMC's new VMAX 40K consolidates EMC and non-EMC storage capacity into a single virtual storage pool via its new Federated Tiered Storage software. The software performs active data integrity checking on data from any back-end arrays to protect against silent data corruption, and it lets customers use Symmetrix SRDF and TimeFinder software for business continuity, FAST VP for improved performance, and other EMC software to manage data across those arrays.

The VMAX family also now includes the VMAX 20K, which is equivalent to the existing VMAX array, as well as the VMAX 10K, which replaces the existing entry-level VMAXe.

VNXe3150: High Performance For EMC's Entry SMB Business

New to EMC's VNX SMB array family is the VNXe3150. It supports new Intel quad-core processors, up to 100 3-TB near-line SAS hard drives, and SSD tier for high-performance applications, and 10-Gbit Ethernet connectivity for use with NAS and iSCSI storage.

The VNXe3150 is expected to ship in the second half of the year with a starting list price of under $9,300.

When it ships, the VNXe3150 is expected to be the base of a new member of EMC's VSPEX series of reference architectures, as well as the base of a new VCE Vblock.

Adding SLAs To VNX In Virtualized Environments

EMC introduced AppSync, a new software that it said provides a simple, self-service SLA-driven approach for protecting virtualized Microsoft applications in VNX deployments. With AppSync, after users define their service plans, their applications' production data is monitored against their SLAs. AppSync provides granular, item-level data recovery and generates alerts when SLAs are not met.

AppSync also supports new VNX Snapshot capabilities that now support 256 writable snaps per Logical Unit Number (LUN) for up to 32,000 per system, depending on VNX system size. AppSync assures those snapshots can be used to provision copies of production data for application development and testing.

Isilon Gets New OneFS 'Mavericks' Operating System

EMC Isilon's new OneFS operating system, codenamed "Mavericks," brings together big data functionality with such enterprise IT capabilities as security, data protection, interoperability and NAS performance to up to 1.6 million I/Os per second.

Security in OneFS was enhanced with new role-based security management as well as secure isolation under which a file system can be segmented into domains to support enterprise security requirements. The operating system also has new snapshot restore capabilities along with one-click failover and failback with full snapshot integration to improve the Isilon appliances' recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).

Improved Software Capabilities For VPLEX

EMC also enhanced the performance of its VPLEX virtual storage architecture, which allows data mobility between on-premise, public cloud and private cloud storage.

VPLEX 5.1 now includes integration with EMC's RecoverPoint continuous data protection software and the company's Unisphere entry-level and midrange storage management software.

VPLEX is also newly certified for Oracle application environments and with VCE Vblock converged infrastructure environments, and has a 40-percent performance improvement and double the number of virtual servers that can be managed compared to the previous version.

Data Domain DD990: High-performance Backup Consolidation

EMC's new DD990 dedupe appliance allows 248 TBs of data to be backed up in eight hours, and it can expand to 1.3 TBs in useable capacity while consolidating the backups of up to 270 remote sites.

EMC enhanced its Data Domain Boost dedupe performance software with new support for EMC Greenplum big data computing technology and Oracle software. It also has improved performance in EMC Avamar virtualized backup and EMC Networker and Symantec data protection environments.

EMC also introduced the Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture, a new application that shows that the integrity of stored data has not changed over time.

Increased Avamar Performance

Also new from EMC is Avamar 6.1, an updated version of its virtualized environment backup and recovery software that now features three times the backup performance and 30 times the recovery performance of its nearest competitor in VMware environments, EMC said.

Avamar 6.1 also now includes new support for SAP, Sybase and SQL 2012 environments, along with enhanced support for Oracle environments.

Debuting EMC DataBridge

EMC World saw the debut of EMC DataBridge, a new enterprise management tool that provides IT operations teams with a single pane of glass management for building customizable dashboards for delivering IT-as-a-Service.

EMC is providing a software development kit to allow customers to build their own applications for managing storage and server infrastructures, as well as software that allows those custom-built apps to be assembled on the screen as the user wants to view it. EMC DataBridge then runs the screen the user composed.

Atmos: Faster Performance For Building Cloud Environments

EMC updated its Atmos cloud storage platform with networking enhancements for 50 percent faster read and write performance for large objects in big data environments.

Also new are enhanced alerts and aggregated logging at the system, data center and node level; faster node upgrades in distributed environments; expanded tools for creating clouds in Goggle Chrome, HTML5 and Firefox environments; new APIs; and enhanced capabilities for easily moving data into and out of Atmos-based cloud environments.

Iomega Moves Higher Into SMB With New Array

Iomega, a San Diego, Calif.-based EMC company, launched the new Iomega StorCenter px12-450r Network Storage Array for SMB, remote and branch office, and distributed enterprise use. The StorCenter px12-450r features the new Intel Xeon E3-1200 v2 processor, 8 GBs of RAM, and a new version of the EMC LifeLine storage operating system. It is also ready for 4-TB hard disk drives and for use in 10-Gbit Ethernet networks.

The StorCenter px12-450r software stack includes such applications as video management systems for surveillance and a version of the McAfee VirusScan Enterprise running natively on the storage.

Brocade and EMC: Automating Joint SAN Environments

Storage networking vendor Brocade used EMC World to introduce a joint solution with EMC to simplify and automate the management of SAN environments. The Brocade solution, called the Brocade Network Advisor SAN management software, is being sold through EMC as Connectrix Manager Converged Network Edition (CMCNE). CMCNE is integrated with EMC's new ProSphere 1.6 cloud storage management software to let storage administrators navigate from ProSphere to CMCNE to evaluate alerts, analyze performance or make changes to their SAN switch infrastructure via one click on a single screen.

LSI: Bringing PCIe Flash To EMC And Cisco

LSI unveiled at EMC World its Nytro WarpDrive PCIe flash adapter. The adapter, a custom version of its Nytro WarpDrive mezzanine card for Cisco UCS B-series Blade Servers, is also the base product on which EMC's VFCache PCIe Flash card is based.

The LSI Nytro WarpDrive PCIe flash adapter solution combines EMC's VFCache intelligent caching software with the LSI adaptor to automatically cache frequently accessed data to accelerate the performance of mission-critical database environments such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server without disrupting existing storage architectures in Cisco blade server environments. It is slated to ship in the second half of 2012.

Talend: New Big Data Integration Solutions

Talend, a Los Altos, Calif.-based open source software developer, used EMC World to unveil the availability of the company's data integration and data quality solutions for the entire EMC Greenplum database and data analytics portfolio, including Greenplum Database, Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform, Greenplum HD, and Greenplum MR.

The Talend Platform for Big Data offers tools to load, extract and cleanse data located in diverse data sources while providing centralized management of big data projects. The software's graphical design environments simplify Hadoop programming and provides data quality features to identify and link connected records.

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