Hadoop-Greenplum Appliance Coming Later This Year

EMC unveiled a new server that combines Hadoop’s analytics engine for unstructured data with the Greenplum Database, which are both designed to handle massive workloads. The combination of Hadoop and Greenplum is a natural: The same device will enable co-processing of large data sets involving both unstructured and structured data. In this photo, Greenplum co-founder Scott Yara addresses EMC World attendees.

EMC introduced a new solid-state NAND flash-based PCIe card that puts servers on steroids, so to speak, in order to move virtual machines and large workloads from one place to another for efficiency reasons. But EMC is not admitting it’s going into the server business—at least not yet. “We are playing at the server level in many areas, no question about it,” CEO Joe Tucci told eWEEK. “But as for building devices for the server market, we have partners that already do a good job at it, so we’re not going there.” EMC President and Chief Operating Officer Pat Gelsinger (right) discusses this with Wikibons Dave Vallente on a Webcast.

EMC is going more and more toward solid-state storage and processing. At EMC World, the company introduced VPlex Geo, an improvement upon a year-old product that enables terabytes of data inside non-EMC and non-connected storage systems in geographically dispersed data centers to be used as a single pool of virtual storage.

EMC and cloud storage/collaboration software maker Box announced a new agreement that gives its users access to EMC’s Documentum enterprise repository directly from the cloud. For Documentum and EMC, this suddenly opens up a previously closed platform and gives it all the advantages of mobile-cloud access without having to do a lot of expensive new development. Box has already done that, and very well with it.

As far as EMC CEO Joe Tucci is concerned—and his opinion is quite powerful—the future of his company is the hybrid cloud and big data analytics. “We’re assembling best-of-breed technology, people and partners to help customers to access the cloud and big their data assets … I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and I’ve seen infrastructure, applications and end user devices change, but never all at same time.”

VMware President Paul Maritz reported in his keynote that VMware is currently working on virtualization of mobile handset software. “We are moving into the post-PC era, not that laptops and Windows are going to go away, but they are just going to have to share the stage with other devices. IT can no longer assume it only has to deal with Windows laptops.”

EMC’s head of data computing, Richard Snee, organized a summit of about 300 “data scientists” on Day 4 of EMC World. The former Greenplum marketing VP told eWEEK that his favorite definition of data scientist is that it is “a combination of data analyst and research scientist.” These professionals are able to take science and analytics and extract business value. This is a role that will be needed in more and more businesses as time go on, he said.

EMC launched version 3.0 of its Ionix Server Manager, which can troubleshoot an entire virtualized system, whether it has public, private, hybrid or any other kind of service-related element within it. This is enabled by integration with VMware’s vCenter and a full understanding of VMware’s vSwitch. An example of the reports Ionix Server Manager generates is show here.

A flock of new features for the Symmetrix VMAX storage line were introduced that, like just about everything else, are aimed directly at cloud deployments. The company introduced more than 50 of them, including native support for FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet); an expansion of FLM (Federated Live Migration), the industry’s only built-in array-based functionality for technology refreshes; and increased security with new support for external servers.

Each year at EMC World the company holds a robotics contest called the VEX Robotics Competition. Robot-builders from all over the world won local competitions in order to qualify to show their work in front of lots of professionals.