Vendors have always held glitzy technology events to push new products and services, but seismic changes in the way enterprise technology is delivered have forced them to up their game in a bid to convince customers they have a place in a fast-changing world.
In London last week, EMC held a launch amid dry ice, Dr Who props and a glam disco covers band. Eventually we got to some storage products.
In the age of commodity computing power, where Amazon and Google clouds have turned IT into a utility service, the pressure is on established vendors to reassert their credentials in a world where technology is increasingly bought as operational expenditure rather than a capital cost.
To be fair to EMC, it is better positioned than most to go with the paradigm shift. Big data is routinely described as the new oil.
EMC has been managing it for years and has some credibility when it claims to be the most capable of redefining it for a new era. "Existing workloads are continuing to grow so the challenge is to reduce cost and deliver more performance," says David Goulden, chief executive of EMC's information infrastructure division.
Among a host of new products was what EMC claims to be the first enterprise- grade “data lake”, enabling organisations to better manage data-hungry workloads.
The concept improves on the data warehouse, the previous model for mass storage, which sucked data out of big ERP systems that was notoriously difficult to analyse in a timely manner. The joke was that by the time you got the information it was already out of date.
Data lakes use HDFS, now the de facto standard platform for storage that facilitates easier and faster access to more types of data. “You can dump much more information in there from all sorts of places, customer systems and IT systems,” Goulden explains. “You still need to process it but you are using the data in a format that lets you analyse it more easily.”
EMC claims another first with ViPR, a software solution that provides a single platform for centralising and automating storage management across mixed vendor solutions. It gives organisations the control they need over complex, hyper-scaled cloud environments.
“We are furrowing new ground here and it’s very strategic for us. It provides a cloaking layer that leverages open-stack standards and manages third-party storage as well as our own products from a software-defined platform.”
This is recognition that all the hype around the cloud is dragged back down to earth by organisations who live in the real world of ageing infrastructure investments that they want to sweat rather than switch for something new and shiny.
“We have got to the stage now where we are producing technology faster than most customers can consume it,” Goulden admits. “It’s going to be to big a leap for customers to get to super new storage straight away.” ViPR is a useful control layer for EMC to sell in to them while they wait for the refresh cycle to come around.
The rate of technical change, however, is quite staggering as vendors like EMC get to grips with managing a data explosion that is affecting every enterprise.
Goulden points out that anyone who owns EMC’s original VMAX storage system from four years ago is now using technology that is two generations behind the latest products. They are missing out on new data efficiency technologies and flash storage, the single biggest change in the market that is easier to scale, highly reliable and increasingly affordable. He claims its XtremIO product is the fastest-growing all-flash array on the market.
The possible downside for companies like EMC is that the rise of commodity cloud services from companies such as Amazon and Google will reduce the number of potential customers.
“That’s not how we see the world evolving,” Goulden says. “There will be a few mega-commodity cloud providers but there will also be thousands of providers delivering services based on different industries or different geographies.”
Cloud is not the only story. He says he has yet to meet a Global 5000 company that is talking about moving all its applications into a cloud. "They will still need efficient infrastructure to run core applications in-house. Like the trend we saw for outsourcing a few years ago, there was an expectation for a while that everyone would move everything to a major provider. It didn't happen then and it won't happen with the cloud." Starting in Cork: Vatican project The first shipment of EMC's Elastic Cloud Storage appliance has left the company's Cork manufacturing facility where it was built and gone to the Vatican library in Rome.
The hardware will provide storage for a vast project that will see the Vatican Apostolic Library digitise more than 40 million pages from its historic catalogue of manu- scripts, books and pamphlets.
Using a certified digital format, EMC is supporting the library in its goal to preserve texts otherwise vulnerable to deterioration and decay from repeated handling.
A total of 2.8 petabytes of data will be generated in the first phase of a project that is expected to last nine years.
“The Apostolic Library contains some of the oldest texts in the world that represent a priceless legacy of history and culture,” says library prefect Msgr Cesare Pasini.
“It is very important that these documents are protected and at the same time made available to scholars around the world.”
