EMC Sets Out To Connect The Entire Data Center To The Cloud

There's no bending with these gales, and EMC is having to go with the flow, enabling data movement off its arrays and into the public cloud.

Encompassing data protection and management in the cloud - with new integrated cloud tiering - the company's cloud enablement announcements come as part of a wider group of feature launches from EMC.

Its strategy to achieve this has been to extend the integration reach of VMAX with enhancements to its FAST.

The VPlex tiering software in EMC's less expensive VNX arrays can also now tap into the cloud.

On Tuesday, the company introduced automatic tiering of data from its VMAX and VNX systems to public clouds including Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform.

The storage giant positioned its improved ability to help customers tier between private and public clouds as the centrepiece of the announcement. Joining the release is a new version of the complementary CloudBoost service that can ship off snapshots created using NetWorker to an organization's infrastructure-as-a-service platform of choice up to three times faster than the previous iteration, according to the company. It enables deduplication and incremental restores simultaneously, without the need for any additional cloud compute infrastructure.

CloudBoost 2.0 will take EMC's data protection tools such as Data Protection Suite and Data Domain and tie them to cloud storage services for long-term archiving.

EMC is responding to this trend by folding in new capabilities to its existing product range to connect primary storage and data protection system to private and public clouds. Spanning Backup for Salesforce now offers better SaaS data restoration options so it's easier restore lost or deleted data. EMC is announcing cloud connectivity of several of its solutions giving IT increased flexibility as well as new tiers to place data on. "When you talk to startups they say that their value is the data that they have". That would be a step too far for VMAX, VNX and Isilon product managers who are not willing, really, to see their hardware disappear to the same degree as NetApp appears willing to consider with its ONTAP DataFabric.

In effect, EMC is saying it's either tape or the public cloud for old and cold data. It's never been that keen on tape, so no real change there then.

Searching for a role in the cloud market, EMC is expanding its portfolio of hybrid cloud services. Both VMAX - with new integrated cloud tiering - and VNX- leveraging new cloud tiering - now offer expanded support for private and public cloud providers.

"Cloud done right can lead to business innovation; cloud done wrong can lead to cloud chaos". NetWorker 9 has a new universal policy engine to automate and simplify data protection regardless of where the data resides.