10 Hot Products From EMC World To Hit The Storage Scene

More Vision, Less Product

EMC World 2013 was a big departure from the EMC World 2012 conference. Unlike last year's traditional focus on new storage hardware and software, EMC this year pushed hard on explaining its vision on such power industry trends as the cloud and the company's ViPR software-defined storage platform.

Even so, there was no mistaking the interest from the crowded solutions pavilion in the Las Vegas Sands Convention Center where EMC and its friends both large and small regaled attendees with a wide range of new storage hardware, software and services.

Want to see a few? Well, then, just turn the page!

Aptare: Cloud Management Software Ready For EMC VSPEX

Campbell, Calif.-based Aptare said at EMC World that its Aptare StorageConsole has been validated for use as part of an EMC VSPEX converged infrastructure solution.

Aptare helps customers better understand their heterogeneous storage and data protection environments across both internal data centers and external private clouds. The Aptare StorageConsole provides chargeback across business units or departments based on raw, allocated or utilized storage volumes; visibility across both internal data centers and external private cloud environments; and tracking and auditable results to prove compliance with regulatory requirements.

Avnet: Roll In The New Data Center

Avnet Technology Solutions debuted a new mobile data center solution based on EMC's VSPEX reference architecture for its U.S. and Canadian solution providers.

The new Avnet Mobile Data Center Solution for EMC VSPEX is designed to be ready to roll wherever an enterprise customer needs a temporary data center that can be quickly set up and will work in harsh environments to support business continuity, data center moves, disaster recovery, large-scale special events and remote field locations.

A full-featured VSPEX-based data center with technology from EMC, Cisco, VMware and others is configured in the enclosure, which is sealed against the environment and includes an electric motor that propels it at up to 3 miles per hour.

Avnet provides partners with sales support for its mobile data center solution through its EMC VSPEX Unsolicited Bid program.

Dimension Data: Three-tiered Cloud Storage

EMC World saw global integrator Dimension Data introduce new tiered storage options as part of its enterprise-class Public Compute-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering. The new offering gives customers a choice of three tiers of storage based on SLA requirements, with pricing ranging from $0.07 to $0.44 per GB per month.

The storage part of the Public Compute-as-a-Service (CaaS) is based on EMC’s VNX storage platform, and it gives a choice of high-performance, standard and economy tiers that can be set dynamically as requirements change.

EMC: Data Protection Suite

EMC unveiled its Data Protection Suite, a new suite of software the company said targets the simplifying of acquisition, implementation, and use of EMC backup and archive offerings while lowering total cost of ownership and providing investment protection for customers.

The Data Protection Suite combines EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker, EMC Data Domain Boost, EMC Data Protection Advisor and EMC SourceOne technology to allow customers to deploy backup and recovery, archiving, and disaster recovery based on their specific consumption and deployment models and to let them migrate their data protection infrastructures to meet evolving requirements.

EMC: Service Assurance Suite

EMC used the conference to introduce its new EMC Service Assurance Suite and update its EMC Storage Resource Management Suite.

Together, the two provide complete visibility into IT environments to help customers identify how resources are being consumed and whether their SLAs are being met. This gives them the ability to visualize, analyze and optimize their environments to ensure SLAs more quickly identify problems and improve their return on IT investments, EMC said.

The suites work across physical and virtual data centers and in dynamic cloud and software-defined IT environments.

EMC: ViPR Software-Defined Storage

A highlight of EMC World was the introduction EMC ViPR, the company's first open software-defined storage platform.

ViPR abstracts and virtualizes storage while maintaining the unique capabilities of the underlying storage arrays. The platform automates provisioning by creating pre-defined policy-driven virtual storage arrays and delivers self-service access to storage. It centralizes storage management and monitors utilization, performance and health all though a single interface across physical and virtual storage.

Because ViPR is software-defined, it can extend to support non-EMC arrays, initially including arrays from rival NetApp. It also uses industry standard APIs to access cloud storage based on Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift and EMC Atmos technologies.

Panzura: Adding FIPS Encryption To Cloud Storage

Panzura, the Campbell, Calif.-based developer of solutions for integrating cloud-based storage as a storage tier, said at EMC World that the company has added FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated Hardware Security Module (HSM) to provide high performance crypto acceleration. The encryption keys are never exposed, providing logical and physical protection from non-authorized access including potential hardware tampering attempts.

The new Panzura solution was validated under the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP), a joint effort between National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of the Government of Canada. Solutions validated as conforming to FIPS 140-2 are accepted by the federal agencies of both countries for the protection of sensitive information (United States) or designated information (Canada), the company said.

Secure-24: New Backup As A Service

Secure-24, a Southfield, Mich.-based provider of cloud computing, application outsourcing and enterprise hosting services, has added a new backup-as-a-service solution to its portfolio of services.

The new service provides enterprises with a solution for reliable, secure ITIL-based data protection processes for their environments.

It leverages EMC Avamar hardware and software, EMC NetWorker data protection software, and EMC Data Domain deduplication systems along with Secure-24's high availability and compliance technology to support customers’ business critical applications and highly available environments within the company's own Michigan, Arizona and Nevada facilities.

Silver Peak: Setting The Bar For WAN Optimization Performance

WAN optimization appliance developer Silver Peak used EMC World to introduce two new data center class software products, the Silver Peak VX-8000 and VX-9000, which the company called the industry’s fastest software data accelerators. Also on display was the Silver Peak NX-11K, a 2U hardware appliance the company said set a new world record for WAN performance with 5 Gbits per second WAN capacity and up to 20 Gbps of optimized throughput for TCP and non-TCP applications. The appliance also supports 512,000 simultaneous sessions.

Unisys: Workspace-As-A-Service Solution

Unisys' new Workspace as a Service solutions, first introduced at EMC World, wrap together a comprehensive range of advisory and cloud-based services for desktop virtualization based EMC VSPEX reference architecture, VCE Vblocks, VMware, Citrix VDI and other virtualization architectures. It is designed to deliver consistent cloud, device, and application performance.

The infrastructure can be deployed as a private cloud in the client’s data center, managed by either Unisys or the client; as a hosted private cloud in a Unisys data center; or in a shared cloud environment.

Unisys Workspace as a Service solutions enable client organizations to define distinct personas for specific groups of users based on their job profiles. The client can then determine what type of support each persona requires and which functions can be offloaded from their devices into the virtualized cloud environment.