New ECS Appliance Combines Benefits of Public and Private Cloud Storage

There has been a lot of discussion in the industry about the pros and cons of public and private cloud offerings, but my perspective has always remained the same: it is possible to build an offering that combines the best of both worlds.  As I’ve suggested previously, with such an offering the economics and scale of the public cloud are not limited to the largest Web companies and service providers, customers of any size should be able to get them.

Today, we announced the EMC ECS Appliance (formerly known as Project Nile), the world’s first commercially available hyper-scale storage appliance for the data center. ECS stands for Elastic Cloud Storage. With the ECS Appliance, any enterprise or service provider can deliver the economics and simplicity of a public cloud along with the control and freedom of choice of a private cloud.

The ECS Appliance allows enterprises and service providers of all sizes to deliver cloud storage at a cost and scale that is competitive with the public cloud.  This means that literally anyone can now effortlessly grow their infrastructure to match their business needs regardless of whether it is measured in petabytes, exabytes or more.

The ECS Appliance offers a new option to customers as they plan their 3rd Platform storage strategy.  It combines EMC’s ViPR software with a low- cost, high-density, commodity hardware-based platform to provide a simple, integrated and optimized storage appliance that offers elastic block, object, and HDFS storage.  Customers can choose the right size for their immediate needs and grow as their requirements change.  The ViPR controller automates the management of the ECS Appliance and lowers the customer’s operational expenses.   See details of the initial EMC ECS Appliance offering here.

While the ECS Appliance provides customers a simple way to get everything they need to build hyper-scale cloud storage infrastructure, our early access program has shown us that there are customers with extremely complex environments and business demands that require even more flexibility and control.

To address their needs, we also offer a version of the ViPR software that customers can purchase and deploy on their own commodity hardware.  Customers now have the choice of a simple, integrated ECS Appliance in multiple form factors or ViPR software that they can configure and deploy on commodity platforms that they source or even build, themselves.

EMC’s software-defined strategy remains the same. We are singly focused on our customers and we will develop products to help meet their needs for the 3rd Platform of IT.  Meanwhile, we will also develop products that address 2nd Platform problems  while providing  customers with a simple, open path to the 3rd Platform.

The ECS Appliance and ViPR software support for commodity platforms are just two of the many new capabilities we are introducing across our entire product portfolio today.   As we look to the future, we will continue to focus on our customers and deliver what I believe is the strongest software-defined storage portfolio in the industry!

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About the Author: Amitabh Srivastava