2016 Data Storage Trends: DevOps, Flash and Hybrid Cloud
While the high drama surrounding the proposed acquisition of EMC by Dell continues, EMC’s technology advances continue. Today EMC rolled out an update to its Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) platform that is at the core of the company’s software-defined storage (SDS) architecture.
Manuvir Das, senior vice president for the Advanced Software unit within EMC’s Emerging Technologies Division, says the latest update adds the ability to search petabytes of unstructured data stored in an object-based storage system using metadata that doesn’t have to be housed in a separate database. Instead, Das says, IT organizations can apply analytics directly against the metadata exposed via ECS.
In addition, DAS says ECS now supports multiple protocols, including AWS S3, OpenStack Swift, HDFS and NFS. That makes it possible for IT organizations to deploy an SDS environment capable of spanning both public and private clouds, Das says.
Finally, Das notes, ECS now supports encrypted data at rest, provides an enhanced management framework that can now access archived data, and can be deployed now on both a traditional server or on a dedicated appliance.
In general, Das says internal IT organizations are quickly coming up to speed on what it takes to deploy and manage data across geographically distributed private clouds. For that reason, many IT organizations are now starting to rapidly embrace object-based storage to not only make it simpler to manage large amounts of data at scale, but also reduce the number of files that need to be distributed using legacy storage architectures.
Clearly when it comes to SDS and object storage, most IT organizations are on an extended journey. But it’s also apparent that if IT organizations want to be able to control their own destiny in the age of the cloud, they’re going to need to get a better handle on all the data now being stored across multiple cloud computing platforms.
