EMC Intros Storage, Cloud Innovations

EMC WORLD — At its annual event in Las Vegas on Monday, EMC rolled out a number of innovations centered around the development modern data center.

The bevy of announcements come as the storage giant puts the finishing touches on its sale to Dell for $67 billion.

“Some are under the impression that innovation will slow [with the Dell-EMC tie-up], but by the time I’m finished [speaking], I think you’ll see otherwise, David Goulden, CEO, EMC Information Infrastructure, told the audience of thousands.

The first is EMC Unity, a new family of storage systems designed to help simplify storage for IT administrators. Unity is the newest member of the company’s all-flash portfolio that it says is “highly affordable” for small and medium-size IT departments. Unity joins XtremIO, VMAX All Flash and DSSD D5 as all-flash storage arrays “purpose-built” to fit virtually any data center.{ad}

EMC says Unity offers cloud-like proactive management and monitoring, integrating with VMware and Microsoft. It features new capabilities designed to give IT control, visibility and automated management of Unity storage systems. Unity service data can also be viewed within EMC MyService360, a new online service – also unveiled Monday – that provides customers with real-time visibility into the health of their EMC environment. MyService360 provides IT with analysis of EMC product code levels, connectivity status, capacity alerts, service activity by site, and more.

Unity was designed to meet the storage challenges of various types of midsize businesses, giving them greater flexibility and deployment options than its rivals, EMC said. Configuration options include purpose-built, software-defined and converged. Designed for all flash, Unity starts under $18,000. Hybrid array configurations start at under $10,000. It is tightly integrated with EMC Data Domain and EMC Data Protection Suite to ensure that workloads are protected.

“As our customers tackle big data apps, data lakes, data centers and hybrid cloud, it’s crucial to have multiprotocol storage systems that can deal with all types of data efficiently,” said Vinu Thomas, CTO, Presidio, an EMC partner. “That’s what EMC Unity delivers on. It also provides more density and performance at an affordable price, along with the simplicity and reliability IT professionals need as they modernize their data centers.”

“It’s always a big deal when we announce a new line of storage,” said Jeremy Burton, president, Products & Marketing, EMC. “Unity is going to surprise a lot of people … all-flash array starting at $18,000. We believe that’s half the price of what the competition is going to be able to produce. Mind-blowing ease of use.”

The other big product news on Monday was the launch of …

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… the Virtustream Storage Cloud, which the company says offers enterprise levels of resiliency and performance combined with true Web scale. EMC acquired Virtustream last year.

Virtustream Storage Cloud is built for largest enterprises, service providers, and public-sector companies, which need to secure, manage, and store mission-critical data in the cloud. It

provides seamless cloud extensibility for on-premises EMC storage, providing customers with simple and efficient tiering, long-term backup retention, and cold storage in the cloud, with single-source EMC support, the company said.

“Enterprises are generating exponentially growing data and looking for cost-effective strategies for long-term backup retention and archival storage, in addition to seeking resilient, cost-effective and scalable platforms for cloud-native application data,” said Rodney Rogers, CEO at Virtustream. “Virtustream Storage Cloud will provide a scalable, enterprise-class platform to meet our customers’ cloud storage needs for both second and third platform applications.”

Among the other product-related announcements were:

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