Welcome to Data Lake 2.0!
EMC has just announced three new products — EMC IsilonSD Edge, Isilon OneFS.Next (the future version of the Isilon OneFS operating system), and Isilon CloudPools—that combine to enable you to expand your data lake to enterprise edge locations (e.g., remote and branch offices) and the cloud while strengthening the data lake at the core data center.
This new edge-to-core-cloud approach offers new opportunities for you to harness the power of a data lake to increase efficiency, cut costs, improve data protection, and get more value from your data assets.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vixv5QLeCs”]
Opportunities at the Edge
Businesses with networks of remote or branch offices often have challenges managing and protecting data generated at these locations. Data at edge locations is growing. A recent ESG study1 showed that 68% of organizations now have more than 10 TB of data per branch office as compared to just 23% in 2011. Edge locations are often inefficient islands of storage with inconsistent data protection practices. Compounding the problem, IT resources at these locations are typically very limited. Data at the edge is also generally outside the business data lake; this means it can’t easily be incorporated into data analytics projects.
EMC IsilonSD Edge is designed to address these challenges and offers key advantages for businesses with edge locations. EMC IsilonSD is a new family of Software-Defined Storage products that leverages the power of EMC Isilon scale-out NAS and the Isilon OneFS operating system. IsilonSD Edge is the first offering of the IsilonSD family and provides Software-Defined Storage solutions specifically for edge locations. IsilonSD Edge runs on commodity hardware (x86 servers) in a VMware ESX environment.
IsilonSD Edge will be offered in two versions: a ‘free and frictionless’ download for non-production use and a licensed version for production use. Designed to simplify data and storage management at the edge, IsilonSD Edge scales to 36 TB of storage capacity in a single installation. Importantly, IsilonSD Edge allows you to consolidate data to the core data center and thereby extend the data lake to include edge locations. It also increases data protection at the edge by automatically replicating data to the core.
Opportunities at the Core
A data lake offers many advantages for organizations across a wide range of industries. By consolidating file-based, unstructured data on EMC Isilon—the #1 scale-out NAS storage platform in the industry—you can eliminate costly storage silos, simplify management, increase data protection, and get more value from your data assets. With built-in multi-protocol capabilities, Isilon storage solutions can support a wide range of traditional and next-generation applications on a single platform. This includes powerful Big Data analytics that can help your organization gain insight and identify new opportunities to accelerate your business. The new Isilon OneFS.Next operating system extends these benefits by offering enterprise-grade continuous service for the data center with nondisruptive upgrade capabilities, enabling the new Data Lake 2.0 edge-to-core-cloud approach.
Opportunities at the Cloud
Nearly all businesses today are looking to leverage the cloud to cut costs, simplify IT management, and gain virtually limitless storage capacity. But the question for many is how to integrate their on-premise storage infrastructure with the cloud. The new Isilon CloudPools software addresses this need. CloudPools provides policy-based, automated tiering that lets you to seamlessly integrate with the cloud as an additional storage tier from the Isilon cluster at your data center. This allows you to address rapid data growth and optimize data center storage resources by using the cloud as a highly economical storage tier with massive storage capacity for cold or frozen data that is rarely used or accessed. In this way, more valuable on-premise storage resources may be used for more active data and applications. Another key advantage is that the movement of this data is transparent to users and applications.
With CloudPools, you can select from a number of public cloud services, including Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, or use a private cloud based on EMC Elastic Cloud Storage. To secure data that is archived in the cloud, CloudPools encrypts data that is transmitted from the Isilon cluster at the core data center to the cloud storage service. This data remains encrypted in the cloud until it is retrieved and returned to the Isilon cluster at the data center.
Tips to Get Started
EMC IsilonSD Edge, Isilon CloudPools, and Isilon OneFS.Next will all be available in early 2016. In the meantime, you’ll want to have your team become more familiar with these new products and learn more about the advantages that Data Lake 2.0 can provide your organization. A great way to get started is to visit our website. If you have any questions, be sure to contact your local EMC sales representative or authorized EMC reseller.
We look forward to hearing about your success!
Source: ESG Research Report, Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends, May 2015.
