EMC Offerings Deliver Cloud Integration Across Data Center

EMC Corporation announced the availability of a range of products and solutions designed to connect primary storage and data protection systems to private and public clouds.

As a result, organizations will be better equipped to take advantage of both the agility and unlimited scalability of public cloud services and the control and security of a private cloud infrastructure.

As IT departments rush to keep pace with the demands of the rapidly changing business, they often rely on both the private cloud – because it is trusted, controlled and reliable – and the public cloud – because of its low cost and near limitless capacity. Cloud-enabled storage and data protection solutions, like those being announced by the company, empower customers to deploy a trusted storage environment where data can be automatically tiered to both public and private clouds.

The company is extending its out-of-the box enterprise cloud solutions delivering choice, flexibility and peace-of-mind with easy-to-deploy, easy-to-manage cloud tiering to and from a number of storage platforms.

The company is launching a number of new data protection features that provide customers with the tools they need to ensure their data is protected wherever it resides, regardless of what might happen.

Products and solutions delivering cloud integration across data center:
The company is integrating new and expanded cloud capabilities across its entire storage and data protection portfolio including solutions to store and protect data to, from and within the cloud.

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Tiering data to/from cloud – VMAX and VNX storage platforms deliver simple, automated tiering to and from private and public clouds. The company is further extending the integration reach of VMAX with enhancements to its FAST.X tiering solution, enabling customers to achieve lower TCO by automatically tiering to public clouds from both company and non-company’s storage. Utilizing CloudArray technology and simply connecting a VMAX to a SAN and a network switch, customers can immediately connect the power of the cloud to their data centers and automate the allocation of data to storage targets on-premise and in the cloud, based on their own service level objectives.

EMC CloudArray

Price-sensitive customers are able to achieve similar functionality on a smaller scale by substituting VNX for VMAX in their infrastructure configuration and adding company’s VPLEX. VPLEX cloud tiering extends intelligent data mobility services to the cloud, enabling VNX to non-disruptively tier data in and out of public and private clouds.

Both VMAX – with integrated cloud tiering – and VNX- leveraging cloud tiering – offer expanded support for private and public cloud providers. The company supports Vmware vCloud Air, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform – all while delivering the performance and peace of mind that customers expect from enterprise storage.

Protecting data to/from cloud – CloudBoost 2.0 extends customers’ existing company’s data protection solutions, including the Data Protection Suite and Data Domain, to elastic, resilient, scale-out cloud storage, enabling customers to leverage the economic benefits of the public cloud for long-term data retention. CloudBoost features enhanced overall performance, scalability and manageability, making it even  for customers to cache data locally and move it to the cloud. CloudBoost offers 3x faster throughput and 15x more data capacity than previous versions. Furthermore, CloudBoost enables deduplication and incremental restores simultaneously, without the need for complex cloud compute infrastructure.

Protecting data in cloud – Spanning by the company’s features enhanced restore and security capabilities along with regional deployment within the European Union. Spanning Backup for Salesforce delivers enhanced SaaS data restoration capabilities making it easier for customers to quickly and easily restore lost or deleted data. And, Spanning’s European data destination option helps organizations comply with European data sovereignty laws and regulations.

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Data protection as a service – Company’s service providers and company’s customers who deploy data protection as a Service (DPaaS) in their own private clouds will benefit from features being introduced into the latest version of the Data Domain OS DD OS 5.7, including enhanced capacity management, secure multi-tenancy, and a dense shelf configuration that dramatically reduces TCO.

Simplified data protection management – Finally, the company is announcing the next generation of its NetWorker data protection software. NetWorker 9 introduces a universal policy engine designed that automates and simplifies the data protection process regardless of where the data resides. Using the policy engine, company’s customers will be able to automate the process of moving protection data through tiers of storage, with protected data stored locally for immediate access and cold data systematically handed off to more cost-efficient cloud targets. Additionally, NetWorker 9 integrates with ProtectPoint and delivers integrated block-level protection for Microsoft and Linux environments.

Extending Data Lakes to the cloud – Last week, the company announced CloudPools, a feature for Isilon systems that allows customers to extend their cold data to public and private clouds. CloudPools enables Isilon to tier data to public clouds such as those enabled by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Virtustream services and private clouds with company’s ECS or a remote Isilon cluster. The tiering happens without the need for a cloud gateway, providing cost-effective, easy and flexible hybrid cloud capability.

Cloud enablement announcements come as part of a wider group of feature launches from the company. To read more about them, please visit The Core blog.

Richard Hoare, manager, technology, Sempre Technologies Ltd, said: “EMC NetWorker with CloudBoost has changed the way that we implement long-term retention of backups. Previously, the most cost-effective tier of storage we used was tape, but that came with its own challenges in the form of handing costs, security and longevity. CloudBoost allows us to unlock elastic, scale-out cloud storage, from a variety of vendors, as a seamless extension of our protection storage network. This saves us time and money – as well as delivering a solution that meets our needs both now and in the future.“

Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “Businesses need strategically capable partners to help them to evolve and manage their storage strategies, in order to move forward both pragmatically and optimally in a world of spiraling data volumes and demands. With this announcement, EMC is providing customers with solutions that allow them to better protect their current and future investments in storage technologies whether in their own data centers and/or in the cloud.“

Guy Churchward, president, core technologies, EMC, said: “Many businesses have seen huge benefits from strategically moving data and workloads to the cloud. However, this often means sacrificing some control over the data. Can you move your data across public clouds? Can you intelligently manage your data through its lifecycle from flash to disk to cloud – and then move it back if you need it? And how do you protect it? Only EMC has the breadth and depth of portfolio to empower customers to take control of their data and achieve the greatest efficiencies.“