Computerworld

​Data Lake deepens as EMC expands capabilities to enterprise Cloud

As EMC puts its, three major trends are transforming the enterprise.

As EMC puts its, three major trends are transforming the enterprise.

Firstly, the soon to be acquired tech giant claims enterprises are becoming more global with a distributed workforce.

Secondly, the volume of unstructured data is growing rapidly and doubling every two years, increasing the need for managing data efficiently while also garnering value from it.

And lastly, EMC believes hybrid Cloud has become the preeminent choice for customers to most efficiently and effectively run their data centres.

“With the world’s unstructured data growing at an unprecedented rate, IT organisations are under immense pressure to deliver more effective strategies,” agrees Scott Sinclair, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

“This includes reducing costs, simplifying management and finding ways to consolidate enterprise data sources that can be mined for business intelligence and value.”

As such, and to combat the rising ride of unstructured data, EMC has unveiled the next generation of its Isilon Scale-out NAS Data Lake, which includes new products, features and capabilities that allow enterprises to scale to edge locations as well as to public clouds.

The new products - EMC IsilonSD Edge, the next generation of EMC Isilon OneFS and EMC CloudPools - are designed to enhance the Data Lake by allowing unstructured data to be available not only within the core data centre, but also at data centre edge locations such as remote offices and archived in the cloud.

Designed to offer a more efficient Data Lake, the storage specialists claim the new Isilon solutions consolidate multiple workloads and allow users to access and analyse data from all locations.

“The rapid growth of unstructured data in the data centre core and at the enterprise edge is challenging organisations to both manage data growth and find new ways to tap highly distributed data stores for business intelligence and value,” adds CJ Desai, President Emerging Technologies Division, EMC.

“At the same time, the pressure is still on to keep costs down.

“This trio of new EMC Isilon solutions is designed to optimise every part of the data centre, provide a seamless user experience and create new economics as customers continue to wrangle mountains of data and evolve their Big Data strategies.”

In reacting to the three major trends impacting enterprise, Desai says EMC’s Data Lake 2.0 strategy and new announcements are “at the heart” of managing these challenges.

For Desai, early Data Lake deployments were limited to pulling in only data sources available within - or in close proximity to - the core data centre.

Now however, Desai believes there is an increasing need for the Data Lake 2.0 to expand and be able to manage unstructured data within the core data centre, at edge locations and in the cloud.

“EMC is responding to this shift as one of the few vendors to champion Data Lake architectures and are now rolling out solutions capable of more easily harnessing unstructured data sources that until now have been trapped inside silos at the enterprise edge,” Sinclair adds.

EMC IsilonSD Edge, the next generation of EMC Isilon OneFS and EMC CloudPools will be generally available in early 2016 with pricing information to be made available upon general availability.