At the EMC’s 24 hour mega product launch in Milan, the storage giant has introduced new products which it claims will “revolutionize mid-tier storage.” The gala event kicked off with a speech from the corporation’s President and COO, David Goulden, who talked about the key mega trends that are changing the IT industry and explained how EMC’s new storage products will enable their customers to take advantage of those disruptive trends.
“The big trends are mobile, cloud, big data and social, creating waves of change that are occurring faster than we’ve seen before, Mr. Goulden said. We believe for these changes to be adopted effectively they all have to be built upon a platform of trust. Our focus as a company is on cloud, big data and trust.”
Mr. Goulden talked about the rapid information growth and how it affects the storage industry and said that multi-core technology, Flash storage and virtualization are disruptive data center technologies that will play a key part in helping organizations leverage the benefits of big data.
EMC made several major announcements at the event, including a new VNX hybrid storage line, the general availability of a new software-defined storage platform ViPR planned for end of September, and a new cloud storage offering aimed at managed service providers and enterprises called “Project Nile.”
The new VNX are unified mid-range systems tuned to take advantage of flash and multi-core, the company said. The VNX products now offer up to 1 million IOPs per second and utilize MCx software and flash to increase performance by up to 4 times at one-third of the price. The VNX Series addresses lower latency demands, delivers ease of management for virtualized environments, and improves application availability and data protection for file and block-based applications.
“The underlying subsystem now produces more than 5x the number of IOPs per second, 5x more work, and that can be expressed in applications anywhere from 2x, 3x, 4x or more scaling of the amount of work that you can do on the same infrastructure for a given cost point,” said Rich Napolitano, President of the Unified Storage Division at EMC. “That is a radical innovation,” he added.
New VNX systems are hybrid, supporting both spinning disk and flash memory. According to the company, the largest systems support up to 6 petabytes of traditional disk and up to 600 terabytes of flash.
“The key to unlock the potential of flash and multi-core is the software. Our storage subsystem today is north of 20 million lines of software. We modified about 10% of our code stack,” Mr. Napolitano said.
EMC also announced Project Nile, Elastic Cloud Storage platform that is set for release in the first half of 2014. It is designed for managed service providers and enterprises and it delivers flexibility with the scale, economics and ease-of-use of public cloud with private cloud controls and security.