EMC makes a LEAP forward with Virtustream and more

EMC World The first day of EMC World in Las Vegas caused announcement overload, with the Unity array top of the list, closely followed by a Virtustream storage cloud and more.

The Virtustream Storage Cloud (VSC) is for enterprises and service providers to store data in the cloud, mission-critical data, says EMC. The data can come from on-premises EMC arrays, with automated tiering sending data to Virtustream's "array in the sky" for long-term, archival storage. from products such as Data Domain arrays.

Arriving data is loaded into an object store and this is said to have enterprise-level resiliency – 13 "nines" and hyper-scale. We're told uninterrupted read access minimizes any business disruption in the event of outages.

EMC will receive subscription revenue from VSC customers. President Jeremy Burton likens VSC to the Apple cloud rather than AWS offerings, saying it's a natural place to send cooling or backed-up data from VMAX, XtremIO, Unity, Isilon, Data Domain, and EMC's Data Protection Suite, all of which support the VSC. VPLEX also supports this Virtustream cloud. The company will run its own Virtustream Storage Cloud.

VCS has an S3-compatible REST API interface and EMC says customers can "deploy web-scale object storage for cloud-native applications" using this API, for long-term backup and data retention.

Syncplicity, EMC's sold-off file sync and share product, supports VSC. Virtustream will offer "a hosted Syncplicity enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) solution" based on its Storage Cloud, with mobile users in mind.

Virtustream CTO Drew Gonczi has blogged about VSC, saying it was in development for four years: "What started as a small proof-of-concept has blossomed into an enterprise-class object storage service boasting 1.78 exabyte total capacity, supporting a terabit per second of network ingest globally, and containing 130 billion objects."

He continued: "There are four primary offerings: Standard, Standard Infrequently Accessed, Premium, and Premium Infrequently Accessed. The Standard services offer local storage protection with high durability, but for more critical data or workloads, the Premium service provides an unparalleled thirteen 9s durability and can withstand the loss of an entire data centre, whether temporarily or permanently. Customers may also choose Infrequent Access for archive data workloads to save on monthly storage costs."

VSC "works with open source tools such as Cyber Duck for browsing and manually controlling object content."

This cloud offering features client-side caching to speed reads and lower bandwidth costs. Deduplication and compression lower costs as well.

Isilon customers can use CloudPools policies to govern file data placement and retention in VSC. For Data Domain users no separate cloud gateway or virtual appliance is required; Data Domain Cloud Tier automatically moving deduped backup data directly to VSC.

Data Protection Suite customers install the CloudBoost physical or virtual appliance to cloud-enable EMC backup software and move data to the Virtustream Storage Cloud.

The rest

• LEAP is content management re-invented, being an app suite consisting of EMC and third-party content apps, a modular platform and a marketplace. It is engineered to work “better together” with the Documentum content management products. There are five apps: Courier document exchange, Snap document capture, Concert for document collaboration, Express for document access and Focus for mobile device document access. There is a partnership with DocuSign.
• InfoArchive 4.0 is for petabyte-scale archiving of structured and unstructured data with compliance requirements, and comes from EMC's Enterprise Content Diuvision, as does LEAP. Features enable retention management, legal holds, data masking and PCI compliance without the need to copy or reprocess data after it has been ingested. It can meet compliance scenarios such as Dodd-Frank in the United States, MiFID2/R in the European Union and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OFSI) E-13 in Canada. InfoArchive provides compliant data access for Hadoop and supports SAP active Archiving.
• ViPR Controller 3.0 storage automation software has support for over 50 EMC and third-party storage platforms and us designed to reduce manual tasks by up to 73 per cent. It has appcentric workflows, CoprHD support to add ViPR support to any storage system and new DR features.
• MyService360 is a cloud-based service dashboard which provides near real-time visibility into the health and status of a customer's entire EMC data centre environment. It is built using EMC's internal data lake (cloud) with analytics and visualization tools. Think of Nimble InfoSight as its inspiration.
• Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM) automates copy data monitoring and management. It is EMC's answer to Actifio and Catalogic. EMC says eCDM discovers existing copies across primary and protection storage enables the automation and optimization of copy data to reduce costs and streamline operations. Enterprise Copy Data Analytics (eCDA) is an analytics-as-a-service offering designed to complement eCDM and provide insight to proactively optimise copy data situations.

Comment

EMC will have pretty much refreshed every storage array product and software offering in its portfolio by the mid-point of this year. Burton says the VxRail products are going "gang-busters" while VxRack is off to a slower start as customers examine the idea of a hyper-converged data centre.

The Virtustream Storage Cloud is yet another object storage offering, there being no one object pony covering all the tricks needed. It gives EMC, and hence Dell, a stake in the public cloud which could be hugely important in a long-term sense. There is obvious scope for extending the set of source systems to include DSSD and EMC's converged and hyperconverged offerings, also Dell arrays and HCIAs.

Another potential direction is to expand the provision of services based on VSC, building on the Syncplicity deal.

The eCDM offerings are EMC's riposte to the arrival and success of Actifio and Catalogic and aimed at tackling copy data sprawl.

Price and availability

Check out a VSC datasheet here. Virtustream Storage Cloud will be generally available on May 10, 2016 with nodes in the United States and Europe.

LEAP Courier and Snap are available to a limited number of customers today and will be generally available in June. LEAP Concert, Express, and Focus are in active recruitment for beta customers this quarter with general availability in the second half of 2016. All LEAP offerings are available on pay-per-use subscription basis.

EMC InfoArchive 4.0 will be generally available on June 13, 2016. EMC InfoArchive is volume priced by TB ingested.

ViPR Controller 3.0 will be generally available in the second quarter of 2016.

MyService 360 is available at no additional cost to customers with an EMC warranty or maintenance agreement.

The eCDM product will be available in Q3, and initially focus on addressing copy sprawl in EMC systems such as VMAX All Flash, EMC VMAX3, XtremIO and Data Domain systems. The eCDA service will be available in Q3 as well. ®