EMC Takes on AWS, Google With Software-Defined Storage Appliance

By TC Doyle

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EMC unveiled a much anticipated software-defined storage (SDS) technology that will save customers as much as 28 percent on cloud storage costs when compared to public cloud options from AWS, Google and others.

The new Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) Appliance, which was unveiled Monday at EMC World 2014 world underway this week in Las Vegas, promises the “blended benefits of a public and private cloud, delivering service providers and customers, in any industry and of any size, with the efficiency, agility, security and control of a hybrid cloud,” according to EMC.

When first introduced under the name “Project Nile,” EMC said the ECS Appliance would provide IT departments and service providers the ability “to deliver easily consumable storage services, similar to those offered by the Web-scale public-cloud providers, but with the control security and reliability of a private cloud.”

While still a global king of data-center storage technology, EMC has been buffeted at the low end by public-cloud providers whose storage technology can be purchased “by the drink” instead of by the device. The more flexible model has proven popular with customers ranging in size from SMB accounts to enterprise institutions.

Also at EMC World, the vendor’s largest event for customers and partners, EMC introduced ViPR 2.0, which is an SDS platform that simplifies both existing and new storage infrastructure management, and provides new data services to support data-driven applications and analytics.

Among other things, ViPR plugs into management and orchestration tools from VMware, OpenStack and Microsoft so storage can be a part of broader data center solutions.