EMC Partners with Primary Data to Drive Storage Integration

Cloud Contracts: Six Items CIOs Need to Know Before Signing

At the EMC World 2016 conference today, EMC announced that it is partnering with Primary Data to make it simpler to integrate EMC storage systems with each other as well as public cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services.

Primary Data has created a DataSphere platform that separates data and control paths to make it possible to move data more easily between heterogeneous file, block and object-based storage systems. Kaycee Lai, senior vice president for product and sales at Primary Data, says that while storage virtualization isn’t a new concept, Primary Data saw the need for a better approach that can scale to handle petabytes of data. The goal was to create a lightweight instance of storage virtualization that enables storage integration to take place at unprecedented levels of scale in the age of the cloud.

For EMC, integration with both cloud services as well as a storage portfolio that keeps expanding is critical. Rather than building one unified storage system, EMC has opted to bring to market a wide range of storage systems optimized for different use cases and price points. While that may allow it to better target specific customer requirements, it also creates an integration challenge when IT organizations use different classes of EMC storage.

At the same time, EMC is under pressure from customers to make it easier for them to migrate data into public clouds from EMC systems running on premise.

It remains to be seen just how much data will ultimately run in public clouds. But as enterprise IT systems evolve on premise and in the cloud, chances are high that most IT organizations are not only going to be looking for better ways to get data into the cloud, but just as importantly, move data out of those clouds as different circumstances warrant. Unfortunately, right now, that’s not nearly as simple a thing to accomplish as most IT organizations would like.