EMC World Wizards

If you are like me and want to understand what’s new and hot (or will be hot) in the storage industry, EMC World is a must attend event. During the past several years, EMC has leveraged EMC World to push concepts and ideas that have helped shaped modern datacenters worldwide.

EMC World is a must attend event.

Virtual Data Centers Several years ago, they began touting the concept of “Virtual Data Centers” and how virtualization was going to revolutionize the compute stack and dramatically impact storage. No one can deny how pervasive and important virtualization has become – VMWare and HyperV have literally grown like weeds and are found everywhere you look.

Flash Not long after that, EMC starting pitching the benefits of “flash.” Now everyone is offering some kind of flash technology. Whether its server-side flash (VFCache), flash cache sitting in front of traditional disk drives, or all flash arrays, you can’t talk about storage without the topic of flash coming up.

Cloud Computing “Cloud Computing” was discussed at EMC World next. The concept of Cloud Computing was hyped up so much that a few people even rolled their eyes and laughed at the idea- it’s not so funny anymore. More and more businesses have had wonderful success running their enterprise applications (and entire data centers) securely in the “cloud.”

This year, the theme focused on “Software Defined Datacenters” and the impact this will have for us all. EMC firmly believes we are entering into a 3rd new platform:

• #1. Mainframe Platform - Supports millions of users and 100’s of applications
• #2. Client\Server Platform - Supports 100’s of millions of users and thousands of applications
• #3. Mobile\Cloud Platform - Supports billions of users and millions of applications

John Bowling (Third from left) awarded EMC’s Knowledge Sharing Contest in 2012 for infrastructure

EMC’s product announcement capable of delivering this kind of platform is called ViPR.

Applications will have the ability to simultaneously run within multiple data centers, have the ability to move within private and\or public clouds, be accessible anywhere on the planet and the capability to run from any device.

Although a bit limited in its initial offering, I can’t discount their history and fully believe the concept behind ViPR will become the norm within the foreseeable future.

Whether it truly becomes the next platform of our generation remains to be seen, but I’m excited to be a part of it regardless.