At the EMC World 2016 conference, EMC announced a host of new products and updates to its efforts in storage, data management, and customer service.
The conference, held in Las Vegas, Nevada, focused heavily on the theme of modernization, and the string of announcements and product launches on day one have been labeled by EMC as its effort to modernize the data center. Let's take a look at the highlights of those announcements.
1. EMC Unity
Geared toward SMB deployments, EMC Unity is a family of all-flash storage arrays starting at less than $18,000. According to EMC, 2016 is the "year of all-flash for primary storage," and Unity is their effort to get smaller IT departments on this trend.
Unity brings both file and block storage, and it can be configured as all-flash, hybrid, converged, or software-defined. In its press release, EMC said Unity will help smaller companies make the move from disk to flash, while providing some of the same capabilities seen in enterprise tools.
2. Virtustream Storage Cloud
Virtustream, the public cloud provider that EMC bought for $1.2 billion back in May 2015, announced a new storage offering known as Virtustream Storage Cloud. EMC has labeled the product a "hyper-scale storage platform" and, unlike Unity, it is targeted toward large enterprise organizations.
Virtustream Storage Cloud's key value proposition is resiliency, bringing up to 13 x 9s of data durability and available read-after-failure. Additionally, many existing EMC products will support the platform, including: EMC Data Domain, EMC Data Protection Suite, EMC Isilon, EMC VMAX, EMC XtremIO, and EMC Unity.
3. EMC MyService360
EMC MyService360 is a cloud dashboard that will be available for free to customers who currently have an EMC warranty or maintenance agreement. Users get a customizable view into the health and performance of their EMC environment and glean insights.
In addition to health and risk insight, MyService360 analyzes code levels to see what aspects of the business are due for upgrades and uses data to show the user trends on service incidents and show which of their employees is connected to EMC Online Support. MyService306 will replace the "My Support" tab of EMC Online Support.
4. EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM)
Storage is continually getting cheaper, so it's easier to justify making multiple copies of certain data, but it's still a pain to manage those copies. EMC's Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM) software is the company's attempt to help users wrangle their multiple copies of certain data.
The software helps users discover all of their copies and make sure they are stored securely, and in the correct place. eCDM will be available in Q3, launching with a new service called EMC Enterprise Copy Data Analytics (eCDA), which helps optimize infrastructure for better efficiency.
5. ViPR Controller 3.0
EMC also announced the latest version of its ViPR software-defined storage controller, the ViPR Controller 3.0. The controller is supposed to help enterprises more easily connect their traditional environments with modern, cloud-native ones, and reduce the amount of time spent on manual tasks relative to that move.
The newest ViPR controller will be available in Q2 of 2016 and has three main updates. First, its Application-Centric Workflows make it faster and easier to manage applications, as there is less time spent understanding the underlying systems involved. Second, ViPR can now support any storage system with help from the Southbound SDK, from the open source CoprHD Project. Finally, new, native disaster
