EMC World’s day three keynote kicked off with a little James Bond action in a “movie” called Data Is Forever. In the starring role of Bond, Jeremy Burton, president of products and marketing at EMC, and his sidekick Q2, Josh Bernstein, VP of technology at EMC, are chasing villains stealing their technology.

As the team’s technology fails and they lose their prey, Bond looks to Q2 to improve his technology.

Spoiler alert: Q2 saves the day!

As the emcee of the event, Burton and his sidekick reemerge throughout the keynote to explore how the technology is improving. Additionally, Burton finds time to interview customers and review their use cases.

The refreshed EMC software-defined product suite

CJ Desai, president of EMC’s Emerging Technologies Division, joined the keynote to deliver information about the refresh of every major product line that has happened at EMC over the past 100 days. He commenced with updates in Software-Defined Storage (SDS), open source, data lakes and analytics.

Desai talked about the benefits of SDS by pointing out its three primary advantages: “The first fundamental thing in software designed storage is that you are not dependent on any specific hardware features or technology for you to be able to run software defined storage.”

He continued, “Second, when I look at next-gen applications, they are made up of independent services that can scale. Software-defined storage is the perfect infrastructure, as it allows you to scale out and as application load increases you can have higher performance and scalability. The third advantage of SDS would be that you can have software only if you like doing it yourself, or we can put in the form of an appliance for you or a fully-engineered system.”

Breaking it all down

Desai walked the crowd through three of EMC’s software-defined technologies: ScaleIO, Elastic Cloud Storage and IsilionSD Edge. This portfolio spans all data types; ScaleIO for block, ECS for object and IsilionSD Edge for cloud. Regardless of your workload or what your requirements are in terms of scaling out, EMC boasts a solution for all those applications, Desai said.

• ScaleIO is a server-attached set that allows you to scale up to thousands of nodes; it’s delivered as a software-only, hyperconverged system via a node or fully engineered system.

“This particular product is ideally suited to traditional block applications … as well as and next-gen applications like [Apache] Cassandra, MongoDB or others,” Desai said. “It gives you amazing throughput, and the I/O parallelism is awesome in this product and it supports a heterogeneous platform.”

Last week, the 2.0 enterprise class version was released. The product supports IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), integration with Active Directory, and other identity and access management solutions, offering the highest level of data integrity. Additionally, there are business benefits. Because it can run on commodity hardware, Desai said companies get amazing ROI benefits and total cost of operations are reduced significantly.

• Elastic Cloud Storage is a hyperscale object platform that is ideally suited for cloud-native applications where companies want an exabyte level scale and IoT types of applications.

Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) is a geo-distributed object platform. Desai believes that the protocol support is excellent. It supports S3, CAS, HDFS, NFS … all the protocols that are out there. The product is exabyte scale, so companies can have billions of small files or large files that are terabytes in size. This platform scales as a single global main space as the user replicates data around the world.

Desai explained three key benefits to the product: an advanced metadata search, NFS support and data at rest encryption. “You get the benefits of private cloud, and the economics with ECS are much better than public cloud,” he said. The company asserts a 60 percent cost reduction than the public competitors.

• IsilionSD Edge: The entire functionality of OneFS is available as software only that you can run at your edge locations.

IsilonSD Edge is software-defined storage that can scale up to 36 terabytes in edge locations. According to Desai, it addresses the needs of locations that have growing storage requirements but limited IT resources.

The benefits include enterprise-grade data management and data protection, simplified data and storage, flexible multiprotocol support and storage utilization.

Desai also talked about updates on EMC’s progress on ViPR Controller and the open-source project Southbound SDK for Storage Device Drivers.

Core to edge to cloud

Desai also announced products in the data lake and analytics categories. The product announcements included the release of Data Lake 2.0 and Isilon CloudPools.

With Data Lake 2.0, Isilon CloudPools, EMC hopes to expand its strategy to go from the core to the edge to the cloud using IsilonSD Edge, Isilon ONEFS and Isilon CloudPools.

Desai also announced the release of Project Nytro (all-flash version of its Isilon clustered NAS system) in 2017.

Turnkey Solutions

Chad Sakac, president of VCE’s Converged Platform Division at EMC, addressed the audience about the build versus buy dilemma. He outlined the company’s converged platform offerings noting that the enterprise is experiencing problems with a limited talent pool and retention, slower time to marketing opportunities, and a great deal of complexity.

He introduced the latest platform VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes, a turnkey rack-scale system for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, purpose built for cloud-native applications.

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE