It is an exciting time to be a part of EMC as we are delivering software-defined storage solutions to our customers. I recognize that enterprise IT today is filled with multi-environment complexity and that we need to address head on the challenges of cost, architecture choice and cloud-like delivery. The ScaleIO team is focused on changing how customers think about their data center architectures and providing cutting edge, high-performance software that enables our customers to meet their business demands, improve ROI and achieve SLAs.
TCO optimized, agile and converged infrastructure built upon commodity platforms are driving storage innovation. As such, we are announcing enhancements to EMC ScaleIO that enable our customers and partners to leverage our solutions to deliver what customers and end users demand.
ScaleIO 1.30 is a release that provides value across a wide variety of solutions including both bare metal and hypervisor based deployments; use cases including OLTP workloads; Virtual Storage Infrastructure for enterprises and Service Providers as well as our VSPEX based solution architectures.
ScaleIO 1.30 integrates with VMware ESX, raises storage efficiency, increases capacity, introduces Software-Defined Data Center Protection, improves performance, expands accessibility for OpenStack, improves the user experience for administrators, and introduces new VSPEX solutions.
As you can see there is a lot of innovation happening with these new capabilities, but let me describe a few of our new features you should be aware of:
Significantly improved deployment times for customers running VMware ESX. ScaleIO’s ESX plug-in is designed to improve deployment efficiency for hypervisor customers that need to deploy and manage at scale. Cut installation times by 90% with turnkey deployment and configuration task automation. Customers can deploy over 100 nodes in just over an hour.
Thin Provisioning improves storage efficiency. Customers do more with less and can fully provision a large ScaleIO volume to applications and only consume storage when written to.
Enhanced supported capacity per node by 2x. This capacity increase expands customer configuration and deployment options. With new capacity options customers can optimize commodity based node deployments to maximize CAPEX decisions specific to their environment.
Software-Defined Data Center protection integrates EMC RecoverPoint for global protection of ScaleIO deployments; release is targeted for Q4 2014.
Performance improvements by 200% for block storage in Windows environments. Now customers with Windows environments will be able to meet their growing performance needs for a variety of workloads.
New cache optimizations deliver maximum Capex efficiency and performance. Integration with XtremCache software provides customers the ability to dramatically accelerate application and storage IO.
REST API integrates with OpenStack, and extends management and orchestration developer opportunities for Service Providers and Enterprise customers. Take advantage of new management and orchestration options with ScaleIO’s Cinder plugin or programmable REST API.
Improved user experience for administrators speeds configuration tasks and simplifies management. ScaleIO’s new interface reduces volume configuration time and other common administrative tasks.
With these new capabilities in mind, the key question is what does this mean to our customers?
Here is what we heard from Torsten Boettjer, Head of Technology Strategy Cloud at Swisscom:
“Our strategy is to tap into new revenue sources, and the cloud presents a perfect opportunity. ScaleIO is one of the most important components in this strategy, because it provides mission-critical functionality and outstanding performance in a highly scalable, cost-effective manner.”
HealthCare Realty participated in the ScaleIO 1.30 beta program. Based upon my conversation with HealthCare Realty’s VP of Technology Services, Robert Dillard, he had this to say:
“We believe ScaleIO enables our IT team to deliver business value while increasing speed of delivery and lower overall TCO. Software-defined storage architectures like ScaleIO gave my team the ability to decouple hardware and software and deliver more robust services at lower cost. We envision shifting our hardware refresh cycle to five years from three years, with the flexibility to control the timing of the hardware investment.”
We also are excited about the partner opportunities delivered with new ScaleIO VSPEX based solutions. These new solutions for private cloud and end user computing are built on ScaleIO, EMC’s software-defined storage offering.
“Arrow sees ScaleIO as an integral part of providing a complete converged infrastructure solution for data centers utilizing EMC technology,” said Matt Rochford, a vice president within Arrow’s North American enterprise computing solutions segment. “ScaleIO as part of the VSPEX program allows Arrow to continue to bring solution providers best-in-choice and flexible technology as they solidify the second platform and continue the journey to the third platform.”
With this announcement, we are continuing to raise the bar and removing limits on what you can achieve using software-defined storage.
Share what you think at, #EMCSCALEIO or track me down on Twitter @edbeauvais.
Want to learn more? Click here to check out how ScaleIO address the challenges of TCO and infrastructure agility in our newest on demand webcast.