By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
July 12, 2010

In its continued effort to bring the best of the private cloud to businesses, information infrastructure provider EMC recently announced the availability of a new technology that “teleports” data across small or vast distances.

In a technology that enables federation—a concept which pertains to mobility and shared access of data within and across data centers—the new offering, called VPLEX, will “do to storage what VMWare has done to servers,” according to local EMC executives.

“Federation is the second key ingredient to our virtual storage offering,” explained Karen de Guzman, account technology consultant of EMC Philippines.

With the technology enabling federation, de Guzman said managers can pool together resources and enable cooperation of storage elements by moving data and applications from one array to another. “[With federation], users from one site can gain access to data from another site as if it is local to them,” she pointed out.

EMC’s VPLEX offering, which currently comes in two flavors—Local and Metro, will enable mirroring of data across mixed platforms without impacting host servers and user access. VPLEX Local will allow sharing of data within the data center, while Metro does this between two datamart centers separated by a synchronous distance of up to 100 kilometers.

EMC tested the new virtualized storage offering during the recent EMC World in May, where data from EMC’s data center in Hopkinton were teleported to the venue of the annual event in Boston, Massachusetts, taking only minutes to complete. “What takes Boston Marathon runners hours to complete only took VPLEX a couple of minutes!” remarked Ronnie Latinazo, the decade-long country manager of EMC Philippines.

EMC’s future VPLEX offerings include VPLEX Geo, which allows asynchronous replication and storage among data centers for more than 100-kilometer distances, while VPLEX Global enables active-active sharing of data across continents, enabling a true global data center.

In-Array Movements
The enterprise storage system vendor’s new offering, however, isn’t entirely constricted to moving data across arrays, as they have developed a similar system that automatically moves data within arrays arrays, known as FAST or Fully Automated Storage Tiering.

“Manually moving data from one kind of storage system to another is very tedious,” de Guzman remarked. “In a physical environment, manually doing this is okay. But in a virtual environment, some level of automation needs to be introduced.”

With FAST, high activity data segments of the drives can sit on a stack of Flash storage, enabling for quicker and frequent access to the data. Mid-range data can, on the other hand, sit on fiber channel drives while archived and dormant data can sit on SATA drives instead.

Currently, the FAST system is available on the Symmetrix, Celerra, and CLARiiON offerings of EMC, de Guzman noted.

With FAST, firms realize 20% lower system acquisition cost, likewise eliminating 43% of operating cost due to lower cooling and manpower requirements.

Coupled with storage federation, the new VPLEX offering will ensure that the right data is delivered to the user at the right place and at the right time, a perennial issue besetting companies who have a heterogeneous mix of storage systems that are creating massive information complications.

EMC’s new virtualized storage offering comes at a time when the amount of global information is set to explode to almost a zettabyte’s worth, or a number with 21 trailing zeroes. “Companies today have already maxed out what they can do on the physical layer, so they are moving on to virtual environments,” Latinazo stressed.

With virtualized storage, information is freed from the boundaries of physical storage, and move across vast distances wherever they are needed, ensuring users make full use of them, which translates to better business productivity.

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