EMC has announced a raft of new upgrades to its VMAX family of systems and its XtremIO services, and its Isilon OneFS platform at a special event in London today.

The announcements were made at the Redefine Possible event this morning, where the focus is about how EMC is changing to support the growth of hybrid cloud. At the event, EMC CEO David Goulden revealed that the new VMAX3 line has been revamped as a kind of consolidation service that’s meant to allow companies to manage what data to migrate to the cloud and what data should remain on premises.

According to Goulden, VMAX3 will provide three times the performance of previous iterations. The new system runs on the Hypermax operating system that includes a storage hypervisor, letting customers backup their data on EMC’s Data Domain unit. The system’s consolidation powers should lead to massive cost savings, Goulden assures. “VMAX3 offers mass consolidation of existing workloads and today for the first-time infrastructure apps as well. The new family is also scalable and more powerful – we’ve gone from a few hundred virtual machines to few thousand,” he said.

These are bold statements from EMC, but hardly surprising from a company that often takes an aggressive tone in its announcements. It’s an attempt by EMC to reposition itself as more than just a data storage vendor, into a data service platform. The company talked about the need for a “new and far-mroe agile data center infrastructure”, and that’s exactly where it wants to be. To get there EMC is combining its Hypermax operating system and storage hypervisor into a single product, which should make it easier for storage to spread across multiple layers, and at the same time, improve the performance of applications that rely on Big Data.

EMC has also acquired storage vendor TwinStrata Inc., who have developed their own cloud tiering technology. This fits well with EMC’s existing tiered storage products and means that customers could take advantage of multiple cloud storage vendors, depending on cost and availability, on which to store data. This would mirror what they currently do on-premise with their existing tiered storage solutions.

“VMAX is legacy, and Flash can extend legacy,” said Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante. “All flash is the future and will replace legacy. TwinStrata gives VMAX/Emc an on ramp to the cloud and extends the useful life of assets installed on VMAX, especially if EMC can keep the data in a VMware cloud.”

EMC said that its VMAX3 systems with hypermax will be generally available by the third quarter.

Isilon dives into ‘data lakes’

As for EMC’s Isilon OneFS platform upgrade, which is tied with it’s Greenplum Hadoop distribution, this is specifically focused on the concept of “data lakes”, or the collection and analysis of vast amounts of unstructured data. Isilon OneFS will alllow enterprises to “bring Hadoop into their data center”, saving on the costs and time involved with moving that data into their analytics services.

Isilon OneFS is the latest move from a major vendor to help customers make sense of the Big Data being generated by applications, people, services and devices. This trove of data is so vast that traditional relational databases have been proven unable to handle it all, which is why vendors from Microsoft to IBM are jumping into Hadoop, which is widely viewed as the best framework for dealing with unstructured “Big Data”.

In today’s pitch, EMC says Isilon’s native OneFS file system does a better job of crunching all this data than Hadoop’s own HDFS. It does so by integrating the HDFS protocol so this can be applied to whatever data resides in its scale-out storage repository.

Brian Smith, Engineer Information Technology at Epiq Systems, told theCUBE at EMC World 2013 that Isilon’s biggest selling point is its scalability. Other solutions out there have limited file systems, so it comes down to size, said Smith. “It is more cost effective to use a solution like Isilon, because once the limitation is reached there’s no need for a new cluster — a simple node can do the trick.”

“The rate of innovation in unstructured data storage has accelerated significantly over the past five years,” said Terri McClure, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Scale-out architectures that used to be considered cutting edge technology used only for high-performance computing have been applied to core data center operations, giving us a base to build new scalable IT solutions on. Now EMC, with its next-generation Isilon product, is delivering on the promise of shared data across applications and accessible anywhere, any time.”

The upgrade will be generally available this month.

XtremIO takes aim with entry-level Flash

EMC’s also unveiled a series of upgrades to its XtremIO all-flash storage arrays, which include a new entry-level 5TB starter X-Brick array. EMC also has new XtremIO clusters that support up to six 20TB X-Bricks, all of which are available immediately.

Speaking at the event, EMC’s president of products Jeremy Burton said the X-Brick array was designed as an entry level product that should help to drive adoption of flash in the enterprise. “We know flash is new and there are concerns among customers. The 5TB entry point is for customers trying out the product for the first time,” he said.

“The XtremIO updates make EMC a very strong competitor in the all-flash array market,” added Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman.

photo credits: ecstaticist via photopin cc; XtremeIO storage array via EMC