EMC ups storage and data protection features for hybrid cloud

EMC is upping its hybrid cloud play and banking on New Zealand's high adoption of cloud to propel the company forward locally.

The vendor is delivering out-of-the-box enterprise cloud solutions for its VMAX and VNX offerings with expanded support for private and public cloud services, including VMware vCloud Air, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform, and introducing new capabilities to its data protection portfolio.

Arron Patterson, EMC New Zealand CTO, says New Zealand businesses are moving workloads to the cloud at a faster rate than most other parts of the world.

 "With this launch of our comprehensive hybrid cloud portfolio, we are accelerating the digital transformation of New Zealand enterprises by ensuring all data in the cloud, whether on or off premise, is protected and secure while still being highly accessible to business," Patterson says.

He says as with all change strategies that drive innovation, there are risks to adopting cloud technologies that can mean loss of data and impact to business services.

"We encourage all customers to mitigate that risk by having in place a well thought out hybrid cloud strategy," he says.

"Cloud done right can lead to business innovation; cloud done wrong can lead to cloud chaos," he cautions.

EMC says IT departments are relying on both private cloud – because it is trusted, controlled and reliable – and public cloud, because of its low cost and near limitless capacity.

EMC's VMAX and VNX storage platforms will be able to tier to and from private and public clouds.

Enhancements to EMC's Fast.X tiering solution will enable customers to automatically tier to public clouds from both EMC and non-EMC storage, which the company says extends the integration reach of VMAX and enables customers to achieve lower total cost of ownership.

By utilising EMC CloudArray technology and connecting a VMAX to a SAN and a network switch will enable customers to connect 'the power of the cloud to their data centers and automate the allocation of data to storage targets on-premise and in the cloud, based on their own service level agreements', EMC says.

VNX can be leveraged in a similar way for customers seeking a smaller scale solution.

The company also announced a range of enhancements to protect data moving to and from the cloud and in the cloud.

CloudBoost 2.0 features enhanced performance, scalability and manageability, making it easier for customers to cache data locally and move it to the cloud.

Spanning by EMC now features enhanced restore and security capabilities, while service providers and customers deploying data protection-as-a-service in their own private clouds will benefit from new features in the Data Domain operationg system 5.7, including enhanced capacity management, secure multi-tenancy and dense shelf configuration.

The company also launched the next generation of its Network data protection software, promising simplified data protection management.