EMC also announced a number of changes to its midrange VNX line. Chief among them is the addition of the VNXe 3150, which is optimized for cloud and virtualization applications. Other VNX-related announcements included:
"Many of the 42 announcements were just that they're adopting the latest version of Intel's Xeons and, therefore, getting performance and capacity improvements. I've found more interesting the feature improvements in VMz, VNX and VPLEX," says Howard Marks, founder of DeepStorage.net and a Network Computing contributor. "They've added storage virtualization and multitenant support, which is important to folks building private cloud infrastructures, to VMAX, better snapshots in VNX and integrated RecoverPoint's CDP into VPLEX. Frankly, the cloud stuff is more aspirational than real cloud products."
Analyst George Crump, founder of Storage Switzerland, tends to agree that cloud storage is more a direction, or promise, than a significant business opportunity for EMC over the near term. "I think for the majority of customers, the in-house storage news is most important," he says. "But as they start to look into future architectures and initiatives, the cloud-related announcements grow in interest."
Both cloud and local/data-center storage matter to EMC, argues Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "To be more specific, I think performance improvements are nice but are also to be expected," he explains. "Things like VMAX SP are therefore more strategically important ... however, what's more interesting is that reading between the [pretty widely spaced, i.e., an easy task] lines, what's really more important to everyone is that EMC is clearly stating more than before that it's working to obsolete [the] question [of cloud vs. local storage] and end up with a single orchestration for a bunch of storage, irrespective of who owns it and where it is."
EMC also unveiled its plans for the next generation of the Isilon OneFS scale-out NAS operating system, code named Mavericks. Due later this year, it will feature enhanced integration with VMware, increased single file system throughput, improved caching capability, new data protection and security features, and accelerated disaster recovery and business continuity.
EMC also made a number of backup and recovery announcements, including introducing its Data Domain DD990 deduplication system, which it claims is "more than six times faster and has three times more capacity than its nearest competitor." The new Avamar 6.1 deduplication software and system delivers "three times the backup performance and 30 times the recovery performance of its nearest competitor in VMware environments," adds EMC.
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