EMC recently announced a new family of all-flash and hybrid flash storage arrays aimed at small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers. In conversation with Rashi Varshney of EC, Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solutions – India and SAARC at EMC gives an overview of what CIOs are looking for in storage solutions, and how EMC is looking to disrupt mid market segment.
Edited Excerpts
Please give an overview of what CIOs are looking for in storage solutions? What are the new trends?
As traditional organizations are challenged by new business models from new age organizations, the digital transformation is on top of the agenda of these traditional organizations. And such organizations are looking at ways to ‘optimize’ their investments in their current applications (also known as Platform 2) environments at the same time invest that money into new age (also known as platform 3) applications.
As a result, the CIOs are currently looking at ways to modernize their data centres which are able to bring in the agility, speed and efficiency. Storage plays very important role in data centre, building agility, speed and efficiency in storage infrastructure is what CIOs as looking for.
Using all-flash technologies to optimize investment, scale-out architecture to grow as seamlessly as the business grows, software defined storage to bring in the agility and cloud enabled storage infrastructure are the new trends in storage world. Protecting the entire information infrastructure in this changing world is also key trend that CIOs are looking at.
What are the common complexities of storage environment?
As CIOs drive the digital transformation agenda in their organization, they are challenged with managing two distinct types of applications. The Platform 2 type of application are typically Client server based architectures and these applications rely on underneath infrastructure to be highly resilient. Hence we have seen, highly available storage arrays with fully loaded business continuity and replication technologies. Hence the type of storage systems are built accordingly.
The platform 3 type of application are typically distributed in nature are built on micro services, containers based technologies. These applications are built resilient inherently and their dependence on infrastructure availability and resiliency is very low. Hence such environment is built on commodity-off-the-shelf hardware.
Now building these two types of infrastructure (including storage) and managing them seamlessly is the biggest and complex task for any IT organization. To add to that, in bringing agility, speed and efficiency in Platform 2 infrastructure proves to be challenging as well for CIOs.
Data protection is an integral every data storage environment. How EMC’s solutions can beat those complexities?
In this changing world of storage infrastructure, protection technologies play integral role. As the storage world starts to adopt environments dominated by technologies such as all-flash, software defined, scale out and cloud enabled, the protection technologies have to be equally ready to protect the data in form of new technologies.
EMC’s data protection solutions are built with these trends in mind. Today, we offer technologies which can push on-premise backup data, which has become cold archive, to extend to public cloud provider. Similarly as customers build hybrid clouds for their organizations, EMC technologies offer comprehensive data protection strategy across private and public clouds. This broad range of protection technologies are really appreciated by our customers across the globe.
The EMC unity is specifically designed for the mid-market segment. How do you differentiate it from other solutions?
In above mentioned constantly changing world of increasing complexity and scale, the need for an easy-to-use intelligent storage system has only grown greater. Customers using new applications and solutions require dependable storage and are often tasked with the challenge of “doing more with less”. The EMC Unity family addresses this challenge by packaging a powerful storage system into a cost and space-efficient profile. These are some of the features and supporting statements that allows Unity to redefine midrange storage:
Simple: Simplified ordering, all-inclusive software, quick rack-and-stack, customer installable, a new slick HTML5 user interface, Proactive Assist with call home, and new Cloud-based management.
Modern: Unity is designed to support the latest dense flash drives such as 3D TLC NAND with a Linux-based architecture, incorporating new Intel Haswell multicore processors, 2U dense configurations, offering a new scalable file system (with file system shrink), unified local point in time snapshots & unified replication, integrated copy data management, support for Public and Private cloud access, deep ecosystem integration with VMware (native VVOL’s), Microsoft, OpenStack, and a full REST-API for developers. With Unity and EMC data protection, you can backup 50% faster, reduce protection storage requirements by 10 to 30x and gain 30x faster VMware recovery.
Flexible: You can meet any storage deployment requirement with Unity from virtual to purpose-built to converged infrastructure. All deployment options support the same unified data services (SAN/NAS and VVOLS) for any workload (standalone or mixed) with traditional file (file consolidation, home directories) as well as transactional workloads for both file and block on both All-Flash and Hybrid configurations (Oracle, Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, SAP, VDI, VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V).
Affordable: Unity delivers the best midrange flash economics with a great entry price and overall TCO. Unity All-Flash configurations start under $18K* and Unity Hybrid configurations start under approx $10K. UnityVSA Community Edition allows anyone to get started for free and upgrade into the supported Professional Edition, or purpose-built all-flash or Hybrid systems, or a converged infrastructure approach. And you can make Unity All-Flash even more affordable when you add in EMC’s Unity Xpect More Program.