Today Only News Released During Last Week’s EMC World

EMC World 2024 returns to Las Vegas, NE, at the Venetian, on May 5-8, 2014, under the term Redefine.

It’s the largest private storage show in the world.

Federation sponsors were EMC and subsidiaries Pivotal, RSA and VMware, Diamond sponsors being Brocade, Cisco and CSG.

As usual each year, EMC and its partners use the event to launch a lot of new products and, in today’s newsletter, we have concentrated all the news released during the show on storage.

It’s also a place where EMC loves to push some new marketing words, like ILM or Big Data in the past.

This time it’s “3rd Platform of IT” and more emphasis on “Software-Defined Storage.”

Here is the definition of 3rd Platform of IT by David Goulden, CEO, EMC information infrastructure: “As our friends at IDC explain it, if the first platform of IT was mainframe and minicomputers, and the second platform was the client-server era, the key underlying technologies of the third platform are cloud, mobile, social, and big data.“

Many other storage companies has joins the bandwagon of SDS, sometime confused with storage virtualization, supposed to lower the cost of storage, add flexibility and automated management. SDS is supposed to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages storage infrastructure and data with heterogeneous – and more precisely commodity – storage hardware.

Of course, SDS does not mean that you don’t need hardware but you can sometimes use your current networked storage hardware without adding more investment with SDS or an hypervisor on the top managing all your resources. For example, de-dupe, thin provisioning, tiering and replication can be performed on a global basis independently of hardware from several sources and OSs.

In the case of EMC, of course, it’s not really commodity hardware but ViPR is supporting its own arrays and also RAIDs from some other competitors.