I attended EMCWorld this year to work in the EMC Core Technology Booth. Spanning Backup for Office 365 launched support for OneDrive for Business at the show. It’s been a lot of work to get it launched, so it was great to finally talk about it with customers, partners, and EMC sales folks about it.
Product Announcements
Spanning released support for OneDrive for Business and was part of the bigger data protection launch. This means we’re part of EMC’s strategy to provide customers with data protection everywhere (read an overview of the entire launch here). EMC also announced Data Domain Cloud Tier (native cloud tier to public and private clouds). Probably the biggest data protection announcement was EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM). Copy data management is just what it says – how do you manage all the copies of data you create? Think about all the copies from backups, snapshots, versions…how do you know which copy is the copy? Do you really need to store all these copies? Can you afford to store them all? What’s your org’s strategy to deal with all of the copies of your data? This blog post explains this concept better, and explains EMC’s new offerings to help with copy data management. Chad Sackac’s post gets more into the tech details.
Of course the big news at EMC World was storage related, and this year was a big year for announcements. EMC announced Unity, a mid-range all-flash storage array (details from Chad), the new VxRack system (which is a rack-scale hyper-converged infrastructure system design – read Chad’s system design primer here). If vSphere is integral to your environment, there VxRack SDDC Nodes, which is a VxRack designed specifically for you. It’s the rack-scale version of the VxRail appliance (so you get everything you need including networking – details here). Another flavor is VxRack Neutrino nodes, which is basically a turnkey IaaS. So if you are trying to build a real cloud on premises, this may be the hardware you want to use. The Neutrino backstory is fascinating. Project Nitro is (basically) all-flash Isilon.
The KeyNote
Having worked for both EMC and Dell during my IT career, watching the handoff from Joe Tucci to Michael Dell during Monday’s keynote was pretty was pretty incredible. Tucci was visibly moved when he addressed the crowd, and Michael graciously took the reins and began to lay out his vision for the combined companies: Dell Technologies. While I have no details about what is going to happen, it will be interesting to learn what the outcome will be over time.
Concluding Thoughts
Finally, it was wonderful to see friends from all over the world who were in town to attend EMC World and Interop. These events bring the entire community together, and I think that helps us to remember to think beyond the technologies that we may support for our respective employers.
Image via http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2016/05/02/welcome-to-the-cloud-party-michael-dell-launches-dell-technologies/