I attended EMC World in Las Vegas late last month and had a number of meetings on various topics, most of them storage-related to varying degrees. My overall impression is that EMC has a very nice story—coupled with a range of complementary product offerings—that I think positions it nicely in the context of cloud, big data, file synchronization, archiving, etc. For example:
- EMC’s Mozy online backup solution, which is focused mostly on consumers and small businesses, has been joined by Stash, a Dropbox competitor that is still in beta. The combination offers a very basic tiered storage system that works well for smaller businesses.
- About a week before EMC World, EMC purchased Syncplicity, a business-grade Dropbox competitor that permits administrative controls over users’ file-sharing activities. It operates like Dropbox, but permits more than just personal control over corporate content. How Syncplicity will integrate with Stash, or if they will continue to be separate offerings aimed at different tiers of the file sync market, remains to be seen.
- Among the many product announcements (42 of them in total) was the introduction of Isilon OneFS Mavericks, a new NAS operating system that is focused on highly secure storage for regulatory compliance needs, as well as overall improvements in security through the creation of “authentication zones”—isolated storage pools that may help organizations to prevent or reduce the number of accidental data breaches.
- EMC also announced a new dedupe storage system focused on backup and archival needs for large data centers. The Data Domain DD990 Deduplication Storage System has throughput of 31 terabytes per hour and can manage up to 65 petabytes of data.
- There was also significant discussion around the use of flash memory in a variety of storage applications—not so much as a storage technology in and of itself, but as a means of dramatically improving the performance of more traditional storage, several orders of magnitude in some cases. As Chuck Hollis pointed out in his blog on May 20th, flash is less about hardware and much more about that software that can manage data appropriately for very high performance applications like analytics.