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EMC has introduced a vast array of new gear in Milan at its “Mega Launch” under the slogan SpeedToLead. The newest kit is targeted at private, public and hybrid clouds.

What do we have so far?

For private clouds, EMC previewed Project Nile, an Elastic Cloud Storage platform said to have public cloud "scale, economics and ease-of-use" with "Private Cloud control, security and flexibility". EMC says it should be the first "complete, web-scale storage infrastructure for the data centre".

Project Nile is about bring public cloud economics and scale to private clouds. Advanced Software division president Amitabh Srivastava blogs:

Project Nile will be designed to deliver a streamlined and highly automated user experience from purchase thorough deployment and consumption.

Project Nile will be engineered to enable “Click and Go” access to block, file and object storage depending on a customer’s workload needs. AND it possesses all the benefits of the Public Cloud by being designed for massive scale, geo-distribution, and elasticity.

Project Nile is intended to support multiple standard APIs including Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), OpenStack Swift, HDFS and EMC Atmos. This means that it will help developers more easily move applications between on-premise and Public Cloud environments without the need for costly and time-consuming application rewrites.

Finally, Project Nile will be offered at a very aggressive price point, redefining the economics of on-premise Web-scale storage deployments.

Sounds like ViPR in a set of boxes...

VNX 2 – CONFIRMED

EMC also announced its second generation VNX2, VNX and VNXe arrays, which El Reg covered here.

There is a VNX5400 Lotus Team F1 Limited Edition array in the Lotus F1 team colours to brighten up your boring data centre.

VNX5400 in Lotus F1 team colours.

The VNX-CA (Continuous Availability) product uses VPLEX virtual storage to provide – wait for it – continuous availability if one VNX fails. A VNX-F is an all-flash VNX configuration for the lowest latency and highest data access speed in the VNX range.

EMC announced a single node VNX8000 SPECsfs2008 NFS benchmark result of 580,796 IOPS, beating a previous 497,623 IOPS result using a VNX VG8 gateway and four VNX5700 nodes.

An EMC blog post discusses VNX 2 features in more detail.

VNX8000 SPECsfs 2008 benchmark result. Click chart to get bigger pic.

ViPR, EMC's storage- and control-plane separating software-defined storage technology, will be generally available later this month, with the ViPR Controller and ViPR Object Data Services to store, access and manipulate objects viewed as files "without the latency inherent in current object storage models."

XtremSW v2.0 server flash caching technology has improved management through Unisphere, and support for VMware cCenter, AIX (Power 7 servers running AIX 6.1 and 7.1), and distributed cache coherency for Oracle RAC environments. It also supports the new VNX arrays. There is wider support for third-party server PCIe flash or SSD hardware, including EMC's own XtremSF flash cache cards.

XtremSW 2.0 supports vMotion with automatic failover. There is an XtremSW Management Center to manage cached data and multiple XtremSW Cache instances.

VSPEX template system designs now include second generation VNX arrays and so deliver more storage – EMC sayS you can have twice as many virtual machines for the same price as before. The templates support both Hyper-V and VMware with vSphere 5.5 support being add when it's generally available.

VSPEX also now supports "the DD2500 and DD4200 [and] the latest Avamar technology – Avamar 7 and Avamar-powered VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced – and now VSPEX with RecoverPoint – to deliver continuous data protection."

EMC says it has recorded 3,600 shipments to 3,000 customers by 1,500 partners. There's a blog about the VSPEX news on EMC's website.

XtremSF Oracle RAC support is coming by the end of the year. Project Nile should arrive by mid-2014. ®

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