Today was the third day of EMC World 2016 in Las Vegas, NV. While the first two days were mainly devoted to hardware product announcements, the third day added more software announcements and discussion.
Migration to software
While IT infrastructure is clearly an important aspect of customer’s overall IT and business strategy, most companies are mainly interested in applications. The reason for this is it is the applications that keep the businesses running. The extent that infrastructure is important is as due to the need for that infrastructure to run applications. Most companies now understand the importance software and this can be seen by GE’s advertising campaign that highlights the software development efforts – GE now considers itself a digital company that is also an industrial company. So, while Neuralytix does not believe that every company is not a software company, we do agree that every company needs to understand and be able to leverage advances in technology, specifically software to enhance their market position. Further, a critical part of leveraging the importance of technology is deploying a platform for the development efforts for their software. This is space that EMC wants to occupy with Pivotal and VMWare.
Pivotal and VMWare are looking to become the platforms that customers can use to leverage the emerging technologies that can drive their business forward. Specifically, the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT), require a hybrid cloud platform on which new applications will be built. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VMware IaaS offerings are the building blocks for the EMC platform offerings. Neuralytix believes that while EMC does have strong offerings in this space, they are participating in a crowded market as a variety of competitors are vying to become the platform for the emerging market.
In order to be digital company, it requires two critical components – data on which derive innovation and insight, and the software needed to process the data to achieve the desired result.
Announcements
On this, the third day of announcements, EMC focused on the Data Lake, Open source, Software Defined and Native Hybrid Cloud. Each a product of the Emerging Technologies Division led by CJ Desai.
As we enter the second generation of the Data Lake concept, EMC has, to date started 45 open source projects with 1,100 contributors. The Open source projects focus around deployment and provisioning, and represents a positive start to EMC’s commitment to leveraging the developer community to help accelerate developments to its products.
One such project is the Open source project named CoprHD. CoprHD is the open source version of ViPR. In fact, several contributions from the open source community made it into ViPR 3.0.
Continuing its on its theme of Software Defined, EMC announced IsilonSD Edge. This is a software defined version of EMC’s Isilon storage system, and is meant for deployment at smaller remote offices, permitting the management of up to 35TB of data. This provides seamless single namespace across an entire organization.
Finally, EMC announced its Native Hybrid Cloud. Leveraging VxRACK, it combines open source, software defined and cloud enablement into a single VxRACK node, named Neutrino. Neutrino will enable customers to load a preconfigured, pretested OpenStack environment that EMC has curated, and where EMC will continue to optimize, test and configure the distribution, and include ScaleIO software defined storage capabilities into a developer ready Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Additionally, the Neutrino node can also be configured with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) to provide a fully tested and warrantied Platform as a Service (PaaS).
The capabilities of the Neutrino node can also be made available in the Virtustream cloud with PCF pre-integrated. This gives developers the ability to write code that can span seamlessly between on-premise and in-cloud.
Conclusion
Although EMC World 2016 was overshadowed by the “elephant in the room” – the Dell EMC merger; EMC still made several key announcements and enhancements to its product line. The question for the new Dell|EMC company is how to consolidate its storage platforms. Neuralytix research shows at least a dozen disparate storage platforms between the two companies. This will no doubt provide customers with significant choice, but also make it difficult to help customers choose the most appropriate product for their needs.
However, Neuralytix believes these are short-term issues that will ultimately result in a seamless transition between two great IT companies into a single entity that will have best of breed capabilities from client computing to enterprise computing.
Ben Woo contributed to this Insight.