Storage giant EMC is extracting the most out two previous investments as it sets course to become a big data powerhouse. Wikibon’s Jeff Kelly wrote up the latest news in a blog post: Isilon scale-out network attached storage has been integrated with an Apache-compatible Hadoop distro called Greenplum HD. This is not the same product as the Greenplum HD EMC announced back in May, which is will now be known MR. The major difference is that the new HD does not include MapR’s NFS file system, thus putting more EMC into what was previously an OEM’d solution.

The integration will be made available in two forms. Either as a new module for the Greenplum Data Computing Appliance, or as a standalone appliance that connects to Greenplum HD deployments via 10 GigE. The value EMC promises lies in the potential to solve some of Hadoop’s main cons for the enterprise, namely single point of failure. The result is something that shares a few similarities with how a PaaS such as Amazon Web Services works.

“With Isilon integrated with Hadoop, enterprises can theoretically store all their data, structured and unstructured, in one environment to support multiple applications and workloads, including Hadoop. In essence, the new arrangement allows for the separation of storage from compute in a Hadoop cluster, providing administrators that ability to scale-up or scale-down either of the two independently from one another.”

The Isilon-Hadoop solution is EMC’s latest push to compete in the big data arena, which has managed to evolve beyond its startup phase and attract large vendors such as Microsoft, EMC. New initiatives have proved very fruitful, for the latter at least.

The storage giant’s Q4 revenue exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, as did the results VMware reported around the same time.