Key Principles to Web-Scaling a Network
At the DockerCon 2015 conference this week, EMC revealed that it is not only now shipping version 2.0 of its EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) platform, but that IT organizations can also now make use of Docker containers to deploy ECS on any set of IT infrastructure they want.
Designed to provide a foundation for managing storage within the context of a private cloud, Suresh Sathyamurthy, senior director of product marketing and communications for the Emerging Technology Division with EMC, says ECS provides an object-based approach to managing storage. As part of that effort, Sathyamurthy adds that EMC is now including ViPR storage controller functionality within ECS 2.0.
Like many IT vendors, EMC is taking advantage of Docker containers to essentially make support for any given server platform a non-issue. As a container, Docker provides a lighter-weight approach to virtualization that enables applications running on top of Docker to be deployed on top of any virtual or physical server.
In general, Sathyamurthy says EMC views ECS as a storage framework for supporting emerging applications in modern data centers that are moving away from traditional file systems. Enhancements to ECS include improved support for multi-tenancy within a private cloud, new monitoring and diagnostic tools, better quota and metering tools, the ability to fail over across multiple sites and a new graphical user interface.
The rate at which IT organizations will make that shift will naturally vary. A cloud almost by definition requires access to object storage to really scale. For that reason, most of the public cloud service providers have already embraced object storage. Via ECS 2.0, EMC is making a case for bringing object storage to private clouds built by internal IT organizations. To back that up, EMC is also making a free download of ECS 2.0 available to help IT organizations gain some hands-on experience with private cloud storage.
Right now, there’s nothing simple about building a private cloud that truly scales. But as time goes on, private clouds will increasingly become both easier to build and deploy as vendors continue to roll more functionality into private cloud platforms that one day will be a lot more turnkey than they are today.
