EMC has released an update to ViPR, the company’s software-defined storage management platform, that enables businesses to pluck insights from data that currently resides on their storage systems, without transferring it to specialized systems.
In a company blog post, Manuvir Das, vice president of Engineering for EMC’s Advanced Software Division, announced that his company “is enhancing the object capabilities of ViPR with a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) Data Service” with ViPR version 1.1.
Describing Hadoop as “the standard for Big Data analytics today,” Chris Ratcliffe, vice president of Marketing for the Advanced Software Division at EMC, said his company’s approach to Big Data analytics avoids some major hurdles to mining corporate information.
“If you’re going to do analytics today, you have to copy that data to your Hadoop cluster,” said Ratcliffe. “That opens up tons of legal and compliance issues,” he added. Any file-based arrays under the ViPR management platform is not only now HDFS compliant, it adheres to corporate policies governing data access, retention and safekeeping.
In essence, storage arrays can pull double duty as data warehouses without throwing a company’s legal and compliance processes into chaos.
“Customers can now deploy HDFS across existing files from any ViPR-supported platforms, turning existing storage infrastructure into a Big Data Repository and extending Hadoop analytics to all ViPR-managed data,” wrote Das. The feature can have a profound effect on how businesses and their IT departments plan and budget for Big Data initiatives, according to his colleague, Vikram Bhambri, senior director of Product Management for EMC’s Advanced Software Division.
“Now you can run analytics without having data ever leave that box,” Bhambri told InfoStor. “The same [ViPR] engine exposes HDFS functionality,” he added.
In addition, ViPR 1.1 now supports EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) remote replication. And the company has taken steps to help get more organizations on board, risk-free. ViPR is now free for non-production environments.
Complementing the ViPR 1.1 release, the company also launched Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite version 3.0. Sporting ViPR 1.1 integration, SRS 3.0 represents a “ground-up rework of our storage management suite,” said Ratcliffe.
“It directly addresses the core questions that customers are asking about their storage infrastructures today,” said Ratcliffe. SRS now offers “a very broad range of standard reports,” he added, along with visualizations that keep storage administrators in the loop.
