The companies that are winning in their industries and driving innovation in our world are those that find ways to extract value from data.  Splunk has emerged as the most widely-used and one of the fastest-growing platforms for extracting value from machine-generated data.  Some have called it the “easy button” for analytics…whether it’s Big Data, Fast Data, IoT, cyber-security, or sentiment analysis, Splunk has a compelling story and we (at EMC) like it. The industry also seems to like it, and customers are voting in approval with their dollars.

Splunk customers must be careful to build infrastructures to support Splunk that can scale effectively to meet these needs while meeting enterprise IT standards and Splunk best practices in a modern data center.

To help customers deal with this cycle, EMC will be presenting at this year’s annual Splunk user conference, .CONF with a session titled “Splunk…so Big and Flashy – Building Massive and Efficient Indexer Storage Environments for Splunk.”

During this session, EMC will explore the value of the emergence of scale-out, all-flash storage appliances with inline deduplication and massively scaled-out clustered file system appliances when used for the Indexer storage. EMC will also discuss how storage-based services for data deduplication, data protection, compliant retention, and encryption can solve enterprise IT challenges while making Splunk performance absolutely scream! As a bonus for current EMC customers, we’re also introducing EMC Apps on Splunkbase for monitoring EMC storage appliances. These free apps provide powerful dashboards and reports to monitor the health and performance of EMC storage environment via the Splunk Enterprise console.

Be sure to check out the session on Wednesday, September 23^rd at 12:15 pm and then be sure to stop by the EMC booth in the Partner Pavilion.  EMC will be showcasing demos of our EMC Apps on Splunkbase: XtremIO, Isilon and sneak previewing our new VCE Vision App (this new app is just the start of exciting new things to come from the Splunk/EMC partnership).

We will have more than 20 engineers at .CONF ready to answer your questions and do a little learning themselves.

See you Ninjas in Vegas!

Author information

Cory Minton

Principal Systems Engineer, Data Fabrics Leader, Emerging Technologies Division at EMC

The post Previewing EMC’s Presence at Splunk.CONF 2015 appeared first on EMC Pulse.

A winning Formula 1 car is built with 80,000 parts and components that must perform together at speeds of over 200 mph. To support the success of such a technologically advanced racing car, a wealth of compute, storage and network technologies are required to analyze data, aid design, support manufacturing, monitor on-track performance, and more. Smaller, lighter and faster are the driving forces behind IT as much as they are in Formula 1 racing.

To accomplish all that, it takes an IT infrastructure that’s as streamlined, sleek and powerful as the car itself. Today, with a converged infrastructure from EMC, Lotus F1 Team has achieved that goal.

It wasn’t always that way. Before making the transition to a converged infrastructure and the private cloud, Lotus F1 Team used a single data center, with all its infrastructure contained there. It was built on a client-server, multilayer-switched network architecture. The infrastructure was complex and hard to scale, making it impractical to maintain efficient operations.

Performance was acceptable, but not good enough. This architecture also demanded significant attention from IT—especially when it came to managing data. For example, manual storage tiering limited the volume and speed of data that could be analyzed.

Today their IT profile is sleeker, faster and far more powerful with a VCE Vblock System as the foundation of Lotus F1 Team’s converged infrastructure. An EMC VNX platform with Fast Suite, EMC VPLEX and EMC Data Domain provides federated storage across data centers, automated tiering, continuous availability and data deduplication. Together, these systems eliminate most of the manual administration that stretched the team’s IT resources.

On the track, Lotus F1 Team maintains what amounts to a mini mobile data center made possible by their EMC converged infrastructure. Throughout the race, the team’s strategy and performance engineers are collecting, analyzing and responding to billions of points of data about the car’s overall performance and about its component parts. That information is then relayed to the pit crew and modifications are made during the race.

For its trackside data center, Lotus F1 Team provisions 50 virtual servers to support the race. With 250 sensors on the car, that trackside data center can take in 50 TB over the course of the race. Lotus F1 Team uses that data for many purposes such as to make car adjustments during the race, to track tire wear, monitor and adjust fuel consumption, and many other factors that can mean the difference between a win and a loss.

Convergence and the cloud brought additional benefits to the trackside team and their mobile data center. Since deploying the converged infrastructure, Lotus F1 Team has shrunk its trackside footprint, and tripled performance. With Vblock, the time to receive analytics of real-time performance data has been reduced to less than one minute per lap. Weight isn’t important only with the car; it’s critical when it comes to the cost of maintaining and moving that trackside data center. The almost 20 percent reduction in weight of the equipment saves Lotus F1 Team upwards of $150,000 per season in raw transportation costs.

It takes a lot of people, working together, to put a competitive car on a Formula 1 track. And it takes special IT partners like EMC, working together, to help keep it there.

Author information

EMC Pulse

TwitterFacebookGoogle+

The post The Pit and the Podium: EMC Puts Converged Infrastructure into High Gear for Lotus F1 Team appeared first on EMC Pulse.

We promised them in early 2016, and they’re already here: IsilonSD Edge, Isilon OneFS 8.0 and Isilon CloudPools are available today. Together, these products can transform the way organizations store and use data — whether at the edge, the core or the cloud – by harnessing the power of the data lake.

DATA LAKE AT THE CORE

A data lake offers many advantages. By consolidating file-based, unstructured data on EMC Isilon—the #1 scale-out NAS storage platform in the industry—organizations can eliminate costly storage silos, simplify management, increase data protection, and get more value from data assets.

The new Isilon OneFS 8.0 operating system extends these benefits by offering continuous service for the data center with non-disruptive upgrades and enabling an edge-to-core-to-cloud data lake.

Here’s the skinny on what’s new in OneFS 8.0:

• Non-disruptive upgrades (NDU) capability to maximize uptime during upgrades with a flexible upgrade rollback option for increased management control
• Advanced DR capabilities with support of the SMB3 Continuous Availability protocol and for NFSv4 failover that facilitates non-disruptive operations
• A new and updated FreeBSD 10 based kernel for the OneFS operating system that provides enhanced performance
• Simplified administration with support for an improved Cluster Event Log (CELOG v2) that allows better management and handling of alerts
• Improved performance for Isilon SyncIQ data replication
• Enhanced support for multi-stream NDMP backups
• Improved job engine performance
• Increased security with the ability to configure multiple DNS servers as well as controlled data sharing between Access Zones
• Improved file filtering capabilities allows policy-based control of what files can be stored on an Isilon cluster
• HDFS auditing to address governance and regulatory requirements

EXPANDING THE DATA LAKE TO THE EDGE

Data at edge locations is growing – but edge locations are often inefficient storage silos with inconsistent data protection practices and limited IT resources. Data at the edge is also generally outside the core data lake and can’t easily be incorporated into analytics projects.

EMC IsilonSD Edge addresses these challenges with a Software-Defined Storage solution that combines the power of Isilon scale-out NAS with the economy of industry standard hardware in a VMware ESX environment.

IsilonSD Edge is available in two versions: a ‘free and frictionless’ download for non-production use and a production version that is available through the EMC Store.

EXPANDING THE DATA LAKE TO THE CLOUD

Isilon CloudPools software provides policy-based, automated tiering that allows customers to address rapid data growth and optimize storage resources by using the cloud as an economical storage tier for cold or frozen data that is rarely accessed while leveraging your valuable on-premise storage resources for more active data and applications.

For more info on the new Isilon products, click here.

Author information

Phil Bullinger

SVP Isilon Product Line, Emerging Technology Division at EMC

The post They’ve Arrived! New EMC Isilon Products To Expand The Data Lake appeared first on EMC Pulse.

Lightstorm Entertainment strives to push the boundaries of the film industry; with every movie we’ve done, from Titanic to Terminator 2: Judgment Day to Avatar. It’s interesting creatively for us to do things that stray from the norm, and that culture is reflected in the way we refer to our business.

To me, there’s no such thing as a “film industry” anymore. Nobody works on film anymore; we certainly don’t. We are, unquestionably, 100 percent digital. Movies like Avatar – which grossed more than $2.7 billion worldwide – simply would not exist without digital technology.

Because we’re 100 percent digital, our storage needs have evolved. We have to figure out, for example, how to take all of this data and keep it secure, and share it securely. How do we use digital technology to enhance what we can offer the consumer, or in our marketing of a movie when it comes out?

Additional factors have a significant impact on our storage requirements. For example, these movies have to be designed; every illustration we do, every concept drawing – it’s digital. Every time we come on to a stage and do a test, and our performer does the right thing, the right stunt, the right action, we need to be able to store that data.

With the next three Avatar sequels, we’re going to be pushing the boundaries of technology. These movies couldn’t even be thought about without digital technology, or without strategic partners like EMC that help us to manage all of this data that needs to be stored and pushed out to different teams across the world.

When we were evaluating the EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS system, our team found that it was the solution that delivers everything. It’s cost-effective, it’s reliable, it’s expedient and it’s efficient in how it operates. EMC was able to offer a package that served all of our data needs, and our data needs are huge.

In the case of our Avatar sequels, the volumes of data are going to be in the numerous petabytes for both our Lightstorm Entertainment team here in Los Angeles, and for the Weta Digital visual effects team down in New Zealand. By comparison, for the first Avatar movie, we had 2 petabytes of storage with the Weta team alone, not including the production side.

With the Avatar franchise, we’re not looking to have a number of partners in every area, we’re looking to have the gold-standard partners. The EMC Isilon system we have created brings us a new realm of possibilities around what we can do and how we can push technology even further.

Truly, the door has just been cracked open on what we can do, and I think all of those answers are digital answers. We want to explore things like higher dynamic range and higher frame rates. We also believe that we’re going to be able to create a much higher-fidelity performance for our computer-generated characters thanks to a closer-knit marriage between Weta Digital in New Zealand and our team here in Los Angeles as we’re making this movie.

Digital technology has enabled us to think of anything, and it’s now doable. It didn’t used to be. Whatever Jim (Lightstorm Entertainment co-founder James Cameron) conceives of, whatever our artists conceive of, we can create it, and we can create it not in isolation but with collaboration from the best of the best from around the world.

To learn more about EMC’s relationship with Lightstorm Entertainment, check out the related video: Lighstorm Entertainment Transforms Film Industry with Isilon Data Lake

Author information

Jon Landau

Producer, COO and Partner at Lightstorm Entertainment

The post EMC & Lightstorm Entertainment Redefine the Film Industry for a Digital Future appeared first on EMC Pulse.

While we’ve been busy working with our customers to modernize their data centers, we’ve also been busy modernizing EMC World, preparing to make 2016 the best event to date! This year we’re delivering an exciting lineup of educational tracks, sessions, speakers, and events to help turn plans into actions. In addition, we will be setting the vision for the new company we will become in combination with Dell.

The theme of our 16^th annual EMC World is Modernize and we can’t wait to join customers, partners, media and analysts over an exciting four days in Las Vegas.

While I don’t want to give away all the surprises we have planned, some must-see events this year include:

General Sessions: The EMC World general sessions this year promise to deliver an exciting mix of breaking news, big names and of course, a few surprises along the way. This year EMC’s leadership team, along with some exciting industry gurus, will enlighten us all on how EMC is modernizing the industry, IT and businesses around the world. Check out a full list of presenters here.

Breakout Sessions: We’re excited to offer 300+ breakout sessions organized into content tracks for specific audiences – IT Leadership, Technology and, new this year, Code & Modern Ops. Technical or not, there’s a track for everyone at EMC World.

• IT Leadership Track: Designed for those decision makers shaping the future of business, harnessing Big Data, adopting Open Source and more.
• Technology Track: Dive into the latest EMC innovations including Flash, Cloud-Based Solutions, Cloud-Native Apps and more.
• Code & Modern Ops: Our new Code & Modern Ops track is built on the themes of Learn, Code and Deploy, and will feature sessions on how to successfully build and develop modern apps to help our customers grow their business and gain competitive advantage.

Global Partner Summit: EMC’s valued partners will join us for the fifth-annual EMC Global Partner Summit (GPS), taking place May 2-4 at the Venetian. Attendees will hear directly from EMC executives, positioning our partners for success in selling EMC products and solutions in 2016 and beyond.

Momentum at EMC World 2016 – The Content Management Event Content management professionals from around the world will descend on Las Vegas for interactive keynotes, educational breakout sessions and plenty of networking time to talk. Momentum 2016 is the best forum for customers to get direct access to EMC engineers, product managers and executives, as well as hands-on time with EMC products for content management professionals. At Momentum 2016 they’ll discover new and innovative ways to build and evolve their content management strategies.

EMC vLab Experience: We’ll offer 13 instructor-led and 39 self-paced vLabs with a deep-dive into EMC’s products and solutions. This year, the excitement builds with a top secret bonus session – stay tuned!

Solutions Pavilion: Attendees will be able to explore the exciting solutions pavilion and view product demos, speak with EMC experts, partners and customers. Some of the most exciting EMC-powered apps will be demoed LIVE at the Future Ready Pavilion within the EMC Solutions Pavilion. Come see next-generation applications in healthcare, government, telecom, and more. All major EMC product divisions and Federation companies will be represented, including Pivotal, RSA, VCE, Virtustream, VMware and more.

Women of World: On Wednesday, May 4^th attendees will join together to get a fresh look at managing their careers in the context of change at the annual Women of World. Attendees will learn how to navigate the fast-paced transformation of the technology industry and find new ways to own, modernize and direct their careers.

Customer Appreciation Event: This year, EMC is welcoming Duran Duran and Fitz & The Tantrums. What better way to celebrate EMC World than to rock out with two hit musical acts?

This year we’re also giving customers who can’t join us in Las Vegas direct access to the event virtually from anywhere in the world. Here are the best ways to engage remotely with EMC World 2016:

• Online: Track all the latest EMC World 2016 happenings at emcworld.com
  
• Live Streaming: View video of EMC World keynotes and select conference sessions at emcworld.com/virtual
  
• Social: Follow @EMCWorld and monitor #EMCWORLD to join the Twitter conversation. For continuous updates on EMC news and announcements, follow @EMC_News.

Excited? We are too. Get ready to modernize at EMC World 2016!

Author information

Nina Hargus

CMO at EMC Corporation

Twitter

The post We’re Ready For An Epic EMC World, Are You? appeared first on EMC Pulse.