EMC World: ‘Megalaunch’ Rolls On With Vblock Additions

Thomas Brewster,

EMC continues its massive rollout of products, with some announcements around its converged Vblock systems

EMC has continued to push out updates following its announcement yesterday at EMC World that it would be squeezing out a record 42 products at this year’s event.

Today, EMC unveiled some fresh converged infrastructure features for its VCE Vblock systems, which it puts together with Cisco.

There’s a new offering in the form of the Vblock Series 700 Model LX, which brings together EMC’s VMAX 10K storage array, a Cisco UCS server and Cisco Nexus switches, along with support for VMware vSphere 5. The end goal is to provide customers with tonnes of scalability and automation, as well as the ability to run thousands of virtual machines, EMC said.

Welcome VPLEX

The storage giant has integrated its converged system VPLEX with Vblocks, in a move designed to let IT move data centre workloads across facilities and geographies. The integration means users can pool resources of multiple Vblock systems so they can be shared across a business.

There’s also Vblock Data Protection that combines capabilities of EMC’s backup technologies Avamar and Data Domain, as well as RecoverPoint replication software, so disaster recovery guarantees are on offer.

The VCE business has been making plenty of progress, hitting a $800 million run rate in the fourth quarter of last year. “We are approaching a billion dollar run rate right now and we are growing quite fast,” said Michael Capellas, chairman of VCE.

EMC made another slew of announcements today. EMC’s big data database software provider Greenplum is to turn the switch on of its Analytics Workbench – the industry’s first 1,000-node cluster “that will act as a lab environment for accelerating the pace of big data innovation”. It will be testing out the scale quality of Apache Hadoop and results will be made open source when they come in.

“The outreach we’ve gotten from the community is really exciting. It takes the big muscle of EMC to do these kinds of activities,” said Greenplum co-founder Scott Yara.

Documentum D2 4.0, EMC’s content management platform, was released, alongside EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager features, including expanded VMware integration, and the abilitiy to monitor numerous Vblock systems.

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