Sometime this week EMC announced a new generation of Isilon NearLine storage which now includes HGST 3TB SATA disk drives. With the new capacity the multi-node (144) Isilon cluster using the 108NL nodes can support 15PB of file data in a single file system.
Some of the booths along the walk to the solutions pavilion highlight EMC innovation winners. Two that caught my interest included:
- Constellation computing – not quite sure how to define this but it’s distributed computing along with distributed data creation. The intent is to move the data processing to the source of the data creation and keep the data there. This might be very useful for applications that have many data sources and where data processing capabilities can be moved out to the nodes where the data was created. Seems highly scaleable but may depend on the ability to carve up the processing to work on the local data. I can see where compression, encryption, indexing and some statistical summarization can be done at the data creation site before it’s sent elsewhere. Sort of like both a sensor mesh with a processing nodes attached to the sensors configured as a sensor-proccessing grid. Only one thing concerned me, there didn’t seem to be any central repository or control to this computing environment. Probably what they intended, as the distributed solution is more adaptable and more scaleable than a centrally controlled environment.
- Developing world healthcare cloud – seemed to be all about delivering healthcare to the bottom of the pyramid. They won EMC’s social innovation award and are working with a group in Rwanda to try to provide better healthcare to remote villages. It’s built around OpenMRS as a backend medical record archive hosted on EMC DC powered Iomega NAS storage and uses Google’s OpenDataKit to work with the data on mobile and laptop devices. They showed a mobile phone which could be used to create, record and retrieve healthcare information (OpenMRS records) remotely and upload it sometime later when in range of a cell tower. The solution also supports the download of a portion of the medical center’s health record database (e.g., a “cohort” slice, think a village’s healthcare records) onto a laptop, usable offline by a healthcare provider to update and record patient health changes onsite and remotely. Pulling all the technology together and delivering this as an application stack usable on mobile and laptop devices with minimal IT sophistication, storage and remote/mobile access are where the challenges lie.
Went to Sanjay’s (EMC’s CIO) keynote on EMC IT’s journey to IT-as-a-Service. As you can imagine it makes extensive use of VMware’s vSphere, vCloud, and vShield capabilities primarily in a private cloud infrastructure but they seem agnostic to a build-it or buy-it approach. EMC is about 75% virtualized today, and are starting to see significant and tangible OpEx and energy savings. They designed their North Carolina data center around the vCloud architecture and now are offering business users self service portals to provision VMs and business services…
Only caught the first section of BJ’s (President of BRS) keynote but he said recent analyst data (think IDC?) said that EMC was the overall leader (>64% market share) in purpose built backup appliances (Data Domain, Disk Library, Avamar data stores, etc.). Too bad I had to step out but he looked like he was on a roll.
Comments?