As a general rule, IT environments are a lot more diverse than ever, which results in storage systems being accessed by a much broader array of applications and servers than ever before. To keep pace with that growing diversity, EMC today announced that the software in its ScaleIO storage systems has been updated to add full support for the OpenStack cloud management framework, while at the same time adding support for more traditional enterprise IT technologies such as Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP.
In addition, version 2.0 of ScaleIO software brings with it support for IP6 and the ability to determine whether data is corrupted while running inflight on an EMC array.
In general, David Noy, vice president of product management for the Emerging Technologies Division at EMC, says adoption of ScaleIO has been running high as IT organizations move to build private clouds. Noy says ScaleIO systems, based on a scale-out architecture, allow IT organizations to mix and match Flash and magnetic storage or deploy an all-Flash environment as they see fit. The end result is a degree of flexibility combined with scale that most IT organizations have never been able to achieve using another storage platform, says Noy.
While most of the initial adoption of ScaleIO has been among traditional EMC customers, Noy says that EMC is seeing a sharp spike in adoption of OpenStack for what are known as cloud-native application workloads. ScaleIO is specifically designed to allow IT organizations to leverage a common storage platform across legacy and emerging data center platforms, says Noy.
Naturally, as EMC gets closer to merging with Dell, competition across the storage landscape has never been fiercer. In the meantime, however, EMC is also signaling the fact that long after that merger is completed, ScaleIO will be one of the storage platforms that IT organizations can be assured the combined companies will continue to invest in for some time to come.