EMC revamps lineup with new storage arrays, systems

Summary: For EMC, the wave of products is critical given storage sales have stagnated as customers ponder their technical roadmaps.

EMC revamped its storage lineup to appeal to customers focused on big data applications and so-called 'data lakes,' hybrid data centers and replacing traditional drives with solid state options.

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For EMC, the wave of products is critical given storage sales have stagnated as customers ponder their technical roadmaps. Customers need to figure out how much storage they can offload to the cloud, the economics of solid-state storage and architectures that set enterprises up for the future yet don't lock them in to one vendor. Given those moving parts, it's no surprise that the storage buying cycle has lengthened.

On Tuesday, EMC outlined what it hopes are answers to those aforementioned issues. Specifically, EMC launched the following:

A revamp of EMC's VMAX3 family of systems that enable customers to move away from hardware and offer more of a enterprise data service. The new platform is designed to allow enterprises to manage what storage remains in the data center and where the public cloud makes more sense. VMAX3 improves performance by 3X over previous versions and includes the Hypermax OS, which combines an operating system with a storage hypervisor. The VMAX3 family also includes direct backup to EMC's Data Domain unit.

Overall, the VMAX3 systems can support 100s of virtual machines and scale to 70,000. VMAX3 systems with Hypermax will be available in the third quarter with direct backup, known as ProtectPoint, available in the fourth quarter.

Jeremy Burton, president of products and marketing at EMC, said the new VMAX is usually a big event for the storage giant. Burton said that VMAX will be able to consolidate storage as well as infrastructure such as backup servers. 'There are benefits to running primary backup on the storage array itself,' said Burton, who added that automation will also be a key theme.

An upgrade to EMC's Isilon OneFS platform. The upgrade revolves around enabling data lakes, which allow companies to ingest unstructured information and analyze it. The data lake concept is critical to companies that are using big data applications and looking to connect the dots between structured and unstructured information.

In addition, EMC said that its Pivotal big data unit will offer a Isilon-Hadoop bundle.

A series of features and configurations for EMC's XtremIO all-flash arrays. EMC's flash portfolio now includes low-cost configurations that improve density per storage rack and price/performance ratios.

The all-flash arrays include new in-memory options, data compression improvements and configurations that cover more market segments with a 5TB Starter X-Brick. EMC also has new XtremIO clusters that support up to six 20TB X-Bricks. The systems are available immediately.

EMC also outlined general availability for its software defined storage applications ViPR 2.0 and ViPR SRM 3.5. The software is also available as an appliance.

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