7 New EMC Products Changing The Face Of The Data Center

Data Center Evolution

EMC is clearly evolving toward a future where the biggest market opportunities are in open source, software-defined and commodity hardware, and that evolution can be seen in the raft of product announcements the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company made at EMC World 2015 last week in Las Vegas.

From hyper-converged infrastructure systems that rely on white-box servers to a wide-reaching push to make EMC software available on an open-source basis, EMC said it is preparing not just for the future, but for the steps it'll take toward that future. Partners at the conference said EMC is making the right moves.

"[EMC] seems to be progressing, coming out with innovative products and services," said Mark Bennett, systems engineer at OneNeck, a CRN Tech Elite 250 Winner. "And from the sales and marketing side, it's been great."

Here's a look at what EMC unveiled in Las Vegas.

VxRack

Perhaps, most significantly, EMC announced VCE's entry to the red-hot market for hyper-converged infrastructure with the release of VxRack, a new line of hyper-converged infrastructure systems it said will simplify deployment of cloud and mobile apps. The release also could be another sign of EMC's changing relationship with Cisco. VCE's Vblock and VxBlock systems use Cisco UCS servers and Nexus switches, but VxRack systems use white-box servers from a Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer. VCE said VxRack won't compete directly with Cisco, but serves a market segment in which Cisco does not have a presence.

EMC ViPR Controller

For Jeremy Burton, EMC products and marketing president, EMC World was "historic" because it marked a far-reaching change in the company's philosophy and strategy. Over the next year-and-a-half, EMC will begin making certain software freely available to developers that want to give it a test-drive, he said during a presentation. That includes the EMC ViPR Controller, which will be open-sourced as Project CoprHD, as well as EMC ScaleIO, and eventually most, if not all, of EMC's software offerings, Burton said.

"For the customer, the value is clear," Burton said. "For the partner community, systems integrators can take the software in and use it on projects. For the channel, it's demand creation. If we have everyone taking our software, at some point, the customer will come to the point of deployment and use, and that's good for the channel partner. If a developer is going to steal software, we want them to steal ours."

XtremIO 4.0

EMC announced a free software upgrade to its XtremIO v3 X arrays. XtremIO 4.0 now supports new, larger all-flash array configurations, expands on-demand capabilities and consolidates workloads more quickly and with better availability. EMC said the update offers better data protection, more speed, less disruption, application automation and the ability to manage many clusters from a single management server.

Project Horizon

EMC's Enterprise Content Division announced Project Horizon, a multitenant content platform and apps marketplace it said will help CIOs and enterprises drive their digital agendas, strengthen their competitive advantage and harness the untapped value of business content. The Project Horizon marketplace will be curated by EMC, including both EMC-built and partner-built apps and solutions. In addition, EMC's latest Documentum Capital Projects Express and Documental Life Sciences Solutions Suite also will be available on Project Horizon, which is built on enterprise PaaS Pivotal CF powered by Cloud Foundry.

EMC Data Domain DD9500

EMC also announced updates to its data protection portfolio, including a new EMC Data Domain DD9500 powered by new software and claiming nearly twice the speed, 1.7 petabytes of capacity and support for big data deployments, as well as several software-powered data protection solutions, including a new version of its ProtectPoint software, CloudBoost, which are intended to seamlessly connect customers' existing EMC data-protection solutions to elastic, scale-out cloud storage, such as EMC ECS and Project Falcon.

Expanded VMAX3 Data Services

EMC said it would help further automate, consolidate and protect mission-critical IT operations with an expanded set of VMAX3 data services that will be available during this quarter. The services include VMAX3 integration with EMC ViPR controller software, and automated storage tiering to XtremIO and to the cloud.

Pivotal Big Data Suite Updates

EMC Federation company Pivotal has made what it called significant updates to the Pivotal Big Data Suite. They include upgrades to Pivotal HD Apache Hadoop distribution and up to 100 times performance improvements for analytics solutions, including Pivotal Greenplum Database. The company said the upgrades were designed to help customers manage fast-growing data sets driven by mobile, cloud, social and the Internet of Things.