Verizon Labs Taps EMC

As traditional storage models move from physical storage to virtual – or Software-Defined Storage (SDS), applications are accessing data or virtual disks as opposed to physical disks.

Compared to rigid hardware, SDS’s inherent flexibility improves the use of storage resources as well as enables quicker upgrades and changes.

As part of its SDS strategy for its product strategy and development platforms, Verizon Communications Inc. is expanding its relationship with EMC Corporation to bring together the technology and expertise that helps Verizon customers make the business transition to cloud services. Verizon currently uses EMC to provide scalable virtualized block and object-based storage services.

“With cloud-based storage like EMC’s, Verizon gains adaptability and intelligent data management, which are integral to our cloud strategy,” said Kumar Vishwanathan, VP and chief technologist for product strategy and development, Verizon. “Software-defined storage overcomes the restrictions of hard-wired architecture and delivers the benefits needed in today’s dynamic datacenter environment.“

EMC enables commercial software to work with open source software to improve scalability, performance and reliability. Virtualized storage plays an important role in Verizon’s go-to-market strategy by speeding up delivery of applications and services to its customers.

Verizon Labs is running EMC’s SDS on commodity hardware while taking advantage of containerized, scalable, geo-distributed object storage and maximum elastic performance.

“EMC and Verizon are working to push the boundaries of speed, capacity and capabilities of storage infrastructure to meet the demands of next-generation applications. With this state-of-the-art software-defined datacenter technology, built on EMC’s ScaleIO and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) offerings, we expect Verizon to increase datacenter efficiencies in addition to gaining massive scale,” said Sam Grocott, SVP of product management and marketing, emerging technologies, EMC. “EMC partnered closely with Verizon to deploy this simpler architecture to help support their cloud service strategy.“

EMC is integrating its commercial storage software with the open source Apache Mesos technology, as well as with the Mesosphere Datacenter OS (DCOS), for easier and more effective data center management. This approach allows Verizon to operate a virtualized data center by managing distributed applications on large clusters of geographically distributed computers.

“When it comes to virtualization, the more advanced the organization the greater the benefit, and we look forward to bringing those benefits to our customers,” said Vishwanathan.