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New Pivotal HD Unlocks Hadoop’s Big Data Potential

New Social TV Show: “I’ll Take Mind-Blowing Technologies for $1,000 … Alex”

EMC Unveils Hadoop Starter Kit 2.0 at Hadoop World 2013

RSA & Pivotal: Big Data and Security Done Right

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You can’t move  these days without some vendor or another talking about Big Data and security. It’s often pretty meaningless stuff, with very little practical advice  or insight into actual benefits. Today, though, RSA and Pivotal released a reference architecture … Continue reading

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Paul Stamp
Paul Stamp
Director, Product Marketing at RSA

The post RSA & Pivotal: Big Data and Security Done Right appeared first on EMC Pulse.

So Happy Together – Partner Solutions Support Emerging Workloads for EMC Isilon Customers

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Today we announced new hardware, software and solutions to support traditional and emerging workloads in IT’s mission to transform itself to better meet business needs. These new offerings redefine what scale-out NAS is capable of and enable customers to build … Continue reading

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Craig Cotton

Craig Cotton
Senior Director, Alliances, Isilon Storage Division at EMC

The post So Happy Together – Partner Solutions Support Emerging Workloads for EMC Isilon Customers appeared first on EMC Pulse.

The Big Reveal: Reinforcing the Scale-Out Data Lake

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IT today is running faster than ever before, tasked with an incredibly difficult mission—maximize efficiency by redefining how technology supports the business. The world is moving to a hybrid (private and public) cloud environment, necessitating a whole new approach to … Continue reading

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Sam Grocott

Sam Grocott
Vice President Marketing and Product Management at EMC Isilon

The post The Big Reveal: Reinforcing the Scale-Out Data Lake appeared first on EMC Pulse.

Hats off to the EMC REDEFINE Award Winners at VMworld 2014

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Today, EMC is recognizing companies who are redefining the role of IT in their respective organizations. These leaders are leveraging hybrid cloud and integrated management and orchestration to improve business results and create a more agile and efficient IT organization. … Continue reading

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Brian Gracely

Brian Gracely
Senior Director, Cloud Solutions at EMC

The post Hats off to the EMC REDEFINE Award Winners at VMworld 2014 appeared first on EMC Pulse.


Flexibility In A Flash: VSPEX Solutions For XtremIO And ScaleIO Now Available

EMC Makes a Data Lake Splash at Hadoop World

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Data Lakes continue to gain momentum as the go-to strategy for prepping Big Data for analysis. Since we launched Data Lakes at the beginning of the third quarter, we’ve seen a huge interest from our customers, partners and the marketplace … Continue reading

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Sam Grocott

Sam Grocott
SVP, EMC Emerging Technology Division at EMC

The post EMC Makes a Data Lake Splash at Hadoop World appeared first on EMC Pulse.

IDC Lab Validation: EMC Isilon Data Lake Foundation Trumps DAS for Hadoop

Reaching Solid Ground – Addressing Strategic Gaps in Data Protection

Need a Data Lake Foundation? EMC Portfolio Delivers

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Today, EMC announces new products and solutions to support the Data Lake Foundation—the storage infrastructure that underpins the Business Data Lake solution. The Business Data Lake brings data, applications and analytics together while delivering analytics wherever needed.

When we talk to customers, we consistently hear about unprecedented data growth and the challenges of managing islands of storage.  We shared our Data Lake Foundation strategy last year and have been delivering products like EMC Isilon and EMC ECS (Elastic Cloud Storage) to help customers eliminate storage silos and provide simpler ways to store and manage data so they can focus efforts more toward gaining insights and value from their data.

Here’s what the Data Lake Foundation brings to the enterprise:

  • Efficient Storage: Eliminates storage silos, simplifies management, and improves utilization
  • Massive Scalability: Built from scale-out architectures that are massively scalable and simple to manage
  • Increased Operational Flexibility: Multi-protocol and next-generation access capabilities support traditional and emerging applications
  • Enterprise Attributes: Protects data with efficient and resilient backup, disaster recovery and security options
  • In-Place Big Data Analytics: Leverages shared storage and support for protocols such as HDFS to deliver cost-efficient, in-place analytics with faster time to results.

The two products within the EMC portfolio that best adhere to the Data Lake foundation attributes are EMC Isilon and EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS). EMC Isilon provides an enterprise-scale, file-based Data Lake Foundation with the ability to run traditional and next-gen workloads, while ECS is our object storage Data Lake Foundation for the next generation of modern applications. As for benefits, Isilon provides a great balance of performance and capacity for analytics workloads, while ECS delivers geo-distributed high capacity analytics. With ECS and the new Isilon platform and features, customers have everything they need to store, protect, secure, manage and analyze all unstructured data now, and in the future.

NEW PLATFORM

Last year, we announced that we are doubling our world-record performance numbers with the new Isilon S210 platform. Today we are announcing a 2.5X increase in capacity with the new Isilon HD400 platform that allows customers to scale their Data Lake Foundation to an unprecedented 50PB within a single cluster. This platform is ideal for customers who require a powerful, scalable, high-capacity platform to store between 2PB and 50PB. This capacity is ideal for Deep Archiving, Disaster Recovery and for building out a high-capacity Data Lake Foundation. Further, the extremely dense (3.2PB/ rack) HD400 will help reduce operational expenses including power, cooling and datacenter floor space expense by 50%.

NEW SOFTWARE AND CAPABILITIES

EMC-Isilon-Infographic_Fulldesign.v4_SB

In addition to the new array, we are also announcing new features to enable our customers to gain rich insights from the data within the Data Lake. The new OneFS 7.2 operating system will support newer and more current versions of Hadoop protocols including HDFS 2.3 and HDFS 2.4 delivering faster time to insights.

We are also announcing support for OpenStack Swift to support both file and object – the unstructured data types that are growing the fastest.

NEW SOLUTIONS

The key to realizing value from the data in a Data Lake Foundation is leveraging the rich analytics tools that our ISV partners like Cloudera and Pivotal provide. These partners’ applications are certified to run on the Isilon Data Lake Foundation. Today, we are announcing certification with another industry leader for Enterprise Hadoop: Hortonworks. This certification effort is a culmination of our coordinated engineering efforts to run the most comprehensive Hadoop test suite against the Isilon OneFS system. We also continue to work very closely with several of our other analytics ecosystem partners to provide customers with rich Data Lake solutions.

Mitch Ferguson, VP Business Development, Hortonworks: “With the certification of EMC Isilon on the Hortonworks Data Platform organizations can now leverage their shared storage ability to run new analytic workloads and get more value from their existing data. By working together on engineering and integration with Apache Ambari, customers of Hortonworks and EMC can now deploy tiering and speed up time to insights while using the most thoroughly tested Hadoop distribution against Isilon.”

Visit us at Strata Hadoop World booth #631 for more info on the Data Lake Foundation.

 

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Sam Grocott
Sam Grocott
SVP, EMC Emerging Technology Division at EMC

The post Need a Data Lake Foundation? EMC Portfolio Delivers appeared first on EMC Pulse.

EMC Stands Up New Network Functions Virtualization Technology Group

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The trends of cloud, mobile, social media and Big Data are driving organizations in every industry to adapt to shifting competitive landscapes, new customer expectations, and disruptions in the economics of doing business. One of the industries that is arguably most affected by this massive transformation is the Communications Service Provider industry.

Today, EMC is pleased to announce the formation of a new EMC Network Functions Virtualization Technology (NFV) Group. Through the NFV Group, EMC aims to help providers of all types – regardless of their origin as fixed, mobile, cable or alternate communications service providers – to meet their unique opportunities and challenges.  I encourage you to watch this video announcement from one of our Technology Evangelists, Anton Prenneis, about today’s announcement.

Why are we doing this?   Primarily to help our provider customers and partners innovate to thrive in a rapidly transforming market.

Advanced software and Internet and mobile connectivity are combining to lower barriers-to-entry, enabling new entrants to offer traditional telecom services without having to make the CAPEX investments that have historically been required. At the same time, many providers are finding ways to bundle traditional telecom services with newer services like streaming media and public cloud hosting to generate incremental revenue and increase customer loyalty. To compete in this new world, providers need a platform enabling them to rapidly build and deliver new services with minimum OPEX and maximum speed – which is what you can expect to see from the NFV Group. In particular, EMC is committing to help provider customers and partners:

  • Deploy new services across global networks more quickly in pursuit of new revenue opportunities
  • Analyze, and eventually monetize, the data that exists within their global networks

To help customers and partners do this, EMC is building a Communications Service Provider Cloud architecture that is based on NFV industry frameworks. The architecture will leverage technologies from a unique federation of strategically aligned businesses – EMC Information Infrastructure, Pivotal, VMware, RSA and VCE – and will be designed to enable providers to deliver distributed, multiservice, carrier-grade Cloud solutions. Comprised of an NFVi layer, advanced data and security services, and a management & orchestration layer, the EMC Communications Service Provider Cloud architecture will make it possible to deliver traditional and non-traditional telecom services, and to use Big Data and analytics to optimize operations and create new revenue opportunities. For more technical detail on what the team is building, check out a recently published article in Connect-World Magazine.

Additionally, most major service providers’ architectures are unique to their environment. While standards exist and goals are similar, unique attributes will differentiate the capabilities each provider focuses on. To help assure that each provider can capture that unique identity and value, EMC also brings to the table the Open Innovation Lab. The Lab allows customers and partners to work deeply with EMC technologists and leverage our wide portfolio of technologies, components and products as building blocks in their overall toolkit. EMC invests billions of dollars in R&D annually and more in acquiring technology and, as such, has one of the widest arrays of technology in the industry focused on building and operationalizing clouds. Our belief is that by making that resource base available to our service provider customers – via deep collaboration – we can all move faster to operational and, most importantly, monetizable systems.

EMC has a long history of partnering with many major providers and is uniquely positioned to understand the challenges facing this industry as it transitions into the more IT-centric world of modern telecommunications. In 2013, David Goulden, CEO, EMC Information Infrastructure, described the changing telecom landscape along with key opportunities in areas such as NFV and Big Data (http://tinyurl.com/goulden-2013). Flash forward to the present…  EMC is fully committing itself to this industry with the formation of this new EMC NFV group.

The group, comprised of a team of telecom industry veterans, under my leadership within EMC’s Office of the CTO, is working in tight collaboration with the global GTM organization’s team of specialists who have built their careers implementing telecommunications and cloud solutions. I’m pleased and excited about the collective expertise of this group for the benefit of our customers and partners as they build custom, next-generation telecom solutions.

We’re currently at Mobile World Congress this week talking with customers, partners and analysts about our focus on this unique market. Follow @EMCPartners for the latest news and developments, and engage in conversation by using #EMC and #MWC15.

Author information

John Roese
John Roese
Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at EMC

The post EMC Stands Up New Network Functions Virtualization Technology Group appeared first on EMC Pulse.

Inovalon and EMC Federation Redefine Healthcare through Massive Data Lake

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Inovalon’s cloud-based data analytics and data-driven intervention platforms play an integral role in the evolution of the healthcare industry. No other company offers the combination of large proprietary datasets, advanced data integration technologies, sophisticated predictive analytics and deep subject matter expertise. As the industry shifts to value and quality outcome models, the ability to efficiently and rapidly integrate and analyze large sets of data has become increasingly critical for healthcare organizations to be successful. In virtually every stage of the healthcare system– Big Data analytics can provide the clarity needed to achieve meaningful insight and improvement in clinical and quality outcomes, utilization and financial performance across the healthcare landscape.

Inovalon Quote

The volume of healthcare and patient information is immense, originating from physicians, insurers and patients—all of which span a range of demographics, medical history, medications, immunizations, lab results and many other disparate sources and events. These data sources are often stored in silos making it difficult to leverage this data to improve diagnosis and treatments. Methods for extracting, aggregating and securing data silos are also extremely complex, time consuming and very expensive.

In 2014, Inovalon partnered with EMC and its Federation of strategically aligned businesses including EMC Information Infrastructure, Pivotal, VMware, VCE and RSA to customize a Big Data technology platform to support Inovalon’s business expansion and existing capabilities. The platform consolidates patient healthcare information into a data lake of 9.2 billion medical events, managed through a secure hybrid-cloud solution. This advanced approach to delivering technology is comprehensive in that it provides for real-time data capture, extremely rapid, analytical processing, and seamlessly facilitates the redistribution of healthcare data.    As a result, patient data from thousands of disparate sources is combined to provide the analytical insights to inform, enable and empower the point of care.

The wide breadth of services from EMC and the Federation members provides the tools to enhance the way Inovalon manages and analyzes data.  With EMC Isilon, Inovalon’s data lake provides the reliability and the performance to access and process data instantly. A flash strategy with XtremIO helps speed the performance of our analytics, while saving floor space and power in datacenters.  And, during this transition, a private, instantly scalable cloud on the VMware platform was created. Pivotal provides critical database and integration technologies, and with RSA, security is pervasive throughout the platform. The large-scale, complete suite of solutions enabled by this design perform optimally under the heaviest loads and is flexible enough to scale up or down at a moment’s notice.

Supported by EMC and its Federation businesses, Inovalon’s market-leading technologies in Big Data analytics will continue to play an integral role in driving the transformation of healthcare, delivering quantifiable impact for clients and partners.

To learn more about EMC’s partnership with Inovalon, check out these related videos:
EMC and Inovalon: Flash
EMC and Inovalon: Big Data
EMC and Inovalon: Hybrid Cloud

Author information

Joe Rostock
Joe Rostock
Chief Technology Officer at Inovalon

The post Inovalon and EMC Federation Redefine Healthcare through Massive Data Lake appeared first on EMC Pulse.


Big Data Game Changer: Federation Business Data Lake

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Today, the world thrives on data.  Analytics can build competitive advantage, accelerate revenue growth, and even create entirely new industries. But it’s one thing to generate and store a lot of data; it’s another thing altogether to turn it into the kind of actionable insight that can change the game for your company. This is a challenge that EMC Federation members EMC Information Infrastructure, Pivotal, VMware and VCE have undertaken with today’s announcement of the Federation Business Data Lake.

Watch the Federation Business Data Lake Virtual Launch Event.

Big Data analytics use cases range from customer sentiment analysis to fraud detection to precision farming and thousands of others. Each one has unique technology and data requirements. To take advantage of Big Data, you need to capture and store a wide variety of data types, and be able to access and analyze it when needed.   The combination of technologies needed to do that is what we call a Data Lake, and it allows organizations to build new applications, new products and new business models that will redefine their business.

Many IT organizations have struggled to keep up with the demands of their business users and enable rapid deployment of Big Data analytics.  The challenge for them has been the complexity of mapping analytics use cases to the right technology stack and right storage platform, then deploying and configuring it all together.

Today, the EMC Federation makes the deployment of Data Lakes simple. Our new Business Data Lake engineered solution is built on the EMC Federation’s best-of-breed products for Big Data including EMC storage, VMware vSphere running on Vblocks, the Pivotal Big Data Suite and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.  In addition to the Federation technologies, the Federation Business Data Lake supports a robust ecosystem of third-party analytics products including Tableau and SAS.

To complement these industry-leading technologies, EMC engineered the outcome by providing predefined analytics use cases with automated provisioning and configuration, enabling customers to realize game-changing value from Big Data analytics in as little as seven days.  The Federation Business Data Lake is the next step in our journey towards converged solutions that will redefine infrastructure from hardware up through the application stack, providing the maximum speed and agility to IT organizations.

The Federation Business Data Lake will be offered through Directed Availability in April 2015. EMC will also provide additional Data Lake solutions to enable customer choice.  These solutions enable customers to use Cloudera and Hortonworks and will be available for Directed Availability in April 2015 also.

Here’s what the solution looks like today:

EMC-Business-Data-Lake[1]Today’s announcement is just the beginning. The Federation Business Data Lake has a robust roadmap and will continue to add new functionality. Over the next several months we’ll add data ingest; data indexing for data in the Data Lake and outside it; data governance to enforce policies and ensure users have only the right data sets; and self-service capabilities for analysts to build an environment and select the relevant data sets without manual intervention from IT.

For full details, go to the Federation Business Data Lake on-demand launch to watch a demo on how you can you can quickly stand up Big Data analytics workloads on the Federation Business Data Lake, and change the game for your company.

SASEMC and SAS Redefine Big Data Analytics with the Data Lake

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Josh Kahn
Josh Kahn
SVP, Global Solutions at EMC

The post Big Data Game Changer: Federation Business Data Lake appeared first on EMC Pulse.

Previewing EMC’s Presence at Splunk.CONF 2015

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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.

Slunk Ninja

 

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 23rd 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
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.

The Pit and the Podium: EMC Puts Converged Infrastructure into High Gear for Lotus F1 Team

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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.

http---prod.cdata.app.sprinklr.com-DAM-334-1323003_Lotus4-600x460-1c0b3607-b331-4e57-9cff-4d96d5ee7066-517509988-2015-12-16 21-02-50It 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.

http---prod.cdata.app.sprinklr.com-DAM-334-Lotus_F1_E23-d6f5c0f1-3096-428f-913c-f3dc40ebcab0-483339253-2015-12-16 21-05-34Convergence 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.

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

They’ve Arrived! New EMC Isilon Products To Expand The Data Lake

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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.

This one

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.

this one 2

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

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Phil Bullinger
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.

EMC & Lightstorm Entertainment Redefine the Film Industry for a Digital Future

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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.

Avatar_Sigourn

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.

Avatar

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
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.

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