EMC Sets Out To Connect The Entire Data Center To The Cloud

EMC today lifted the veil on “newly integrated and extended cloud capabilities” across the breadth of its entire storage and data protection portfolio. EMC is announcing cloud connectivity of several of its solutions giving IT increased flexibility as well as new tiers to place data on.

The storage giant said its high-end EMC VMAX and VNX systems will connect to public and private clouds.

“Cloud should be just another storage medium for our customers”, said Chris Ratliffe, senior vice president of marketing at EMC’s core technologies group.

The new offerings carry out one of three functions, characterised as tiering data across diverse storage infrastructures, protecting data in transit to and from the Cloud and protecting data once its static in the cloud.

EMC rolled out a new version of its NetWorker data protection software that automates policies where data resides. For example, CloudBoost, EMC’s cloud protection platform, now makes it easier for customers to cache data locally and move it to the cloud. Furthermore, CloudBoost enables deduplication and incremental restores simultaneously, without the need for complex cloud compute infrastructure. The posterchild of the initiative is the company’s ViPR software-defined storage platform, which can be used with systems from rivaling vendors so long as they provide block-based data access. Spanning Backup for Salesforce now offers better SaaS data restoration options so it’s easier restore lost or deleted data.

Protecting Data in the Cloud – Spanning by EMC now features enhanced restore and security capabilities along with new regional deployment within the European Union.

With a nod to new worries about data privacy in Europe, the company also added a new option to its Spanning service. NetWorker 9 introduces a new universal policy engine design that automates and simplifies the data protection process, regardless of where the data resides.

EMC’s move comes a week after the company outlined its CloudPools effort, which connects its OneFS operating system to Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Virtustream.

Extending Data Lakes to the Cloud – Last week, EMC announced EMC CloudPools, a new feature for EMC Isilon that allows customers to extend their cold data to public and private clouds.

Organizations are starting to use public clouds for storage in order to cut costs and add capacity quickly.

“Tiering is critical to business in our own data centres”, said Arrian Mehis, general manager of VMware Cloud practice at Rackspace, “and in the data centres of our customers”. “You have to protect your data, and you don’t get a choice about it, and it doesn’t matter where it is”.