University Stores the Equivalent of 100 Years of HD Video Content in the Nirvanix Enterprise-Grade Cloud.
Nirvanix today announced that the University of Southern California (USC) will deploy over 8 petabytes of unstructured data on a Nirvanix Private Cloud Storage solution. The Private Cloud will be fully managed as a service by Nirvanix and will include digital content from multiple USC entities, including the USC Shoah Foundation Institute in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the USC Digital Repository, a division of the USC Libraries.
8 Petabytes of storage is comparable to:
Half a Million 16-gigabyte iPhones / iPads
160,000 Blu-ray discs
8 Billion 500-page books
USC Partners with Nirvanix for Digital Content Archival
USC plans to leverage the Nirvanix cloud for its own internal data storage requirements and make it available for external clients as well, particularly in the area of cloud-based digital archives. With the USC Digital Repository, the university has strategically partnered with Nirvanix to archive digital content – such as HD videos and high resolution photos – with services available such as physical to digital conversion, cataloging and full media preservation, all integrated in a secure Nirvanix Deep Cloud Archive™.
"This is essentially the rise of IT consumers creating externally facing value and emerging as IT providers – a trend that began with the early days of the Internet and is now reaching critical mass," said David Vellante, President of IT think tank Wikibon.org. "Across virtually all industries, what customers do with IT is becoming more valuable than what suppliers create at the factory – something you simply did not see with prior generations of technology."
"In the current macroeconomic environment, the combination of hypergrowth in digital content and the need for greater return on investment at all academic institutions is driving the need for a new generation of IT solutions," said Sam Gustman, CTO for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and Associate Dean of the USC Libraries. "We shifted to the cloud because it provides USC with a geographically diverse and cost-effective way of storing, preserving and distributing our content on a truly global scale."
Deployed within USC's central data center, the Nirvanix Private Cloud Storage solution will enable the university and its clients to upload digital content from any location and ensure that it is available anywhere around the world by virtue of Nirvanix's Cloud File System™ software. Additionally, any changes made to files stored in the Nirvanix Private Cloud will be immediately reflected across the whole cloud, ensuring that multiple users collaborating and accessing the same file always have the latest version. This level of data consistency is critical for such a massive amount of unstructured data and is not available from any other cloud storage service or storage system vendor.
"How many conventional storage devices can even handle eight Petabytes distributed around the world?" said Paul Froutan, former head of Google data center operations and current Nirvanix CTO. "The answer: none. This is why companies are shifting to the consumption economics and business flexibility inherent in cloud storage services. There are no physical limitations when you have access to a nearly limitless pool of virtual resources. The age of big iron monoliths is being replaced by more agile, adaptable clouds with far greater levels of flexibility and scalability."
"This strategic IT shift is a precursor of things to come from institutions and enterprises as they look for new, more flexible ways to store massive amounts of unstructured content," said Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix. "The selection of Nirvanix for this large-scale storage implementation continues our significant momentum as the leader in enterprise cloud storage and demonstrates further market share gains."
About USC
The University of Southern California is one of the world's leading private research universities. An anchor institution in Los Angeles, a global center for arts, technology and international trade, USC enrolls more international students than any other U.S. university and offers extensive opportunities for internships and study abroad. With a strong tradition of integrating liberal and professional education, USC fosters a vibrant culture of public service and encourages students to cross academic as well as geographic boundaries in their pursuit of knowledge.
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Along with the new cloud-based software platform, Quantum is also expanding their DXi-Series line with the introduction the DXi V1000, a virtual deduplication appliance. Combining the power of deduplication with the simplicity and flexibility of virtual machines, the DXi V1000 provides customers with an affordable backup and DR protection solution for distributed sites, small businesses and cloud deployments, says Brian McCarthy, CTO and Co-Founder of Cloud Caboodle, in Orlando Florida.
The DXi V1000 is a virtual appliance, a self-contained software module that deploys in any VMware environment, and (like a physical deduplication appliance) works with your customers' backup software to protect up to a total of 40TB of data on any physical and virtual server, says McCarthy. For DR protection, it can replicate to any other DXi appliance (including another DXi V1000), or to a cloud protection service.
Finally, the DXi V1000 can provide extensibility for a cloud-connected architecture, giving users a local copy of their data while their backup copy resides within the cloud. Using this strategy, customers can dramatically reduce their storage requirements, both locally and in the cloud.
For me info contact us at: (800) 557-6540 or email info@cloudcaboodle.com
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Denton City Replaces NetApp, IBM and Dell Compellent with EMC Technologies for Leading VMware Integration, Better Storage Performance with Automated Storage Tiering, and Data Mobility
EMC Corporation today announced that the City of Denton, Texas has standardized on EMC technologies including EMC® VNX® unified storage and EMC VPLEX(TM) Metro virtual storage technology, as well as Vblock® Infrastructure Platforms from VCE, replacing its under performing NetApp, IBM and Dell Compellent storage environment. At 90% virtualized, the City of Denton is leveraging VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies including VMware vSphere and vCenter Operations Management Suite to optimize efficiency, streamline management and transform its IT infrastructure. Since implementing its EMC-based infrastructure, the City of Denton has dramatically increased performance, streamlined administration, and developed a solid business continuity strategy.
Customer Benefits:
Increased Performance--Since moving to a "FLASH 1st" strategy with VNX, Denton's storage performance has increased by more than 230%.
Streamlined Administration--Tight integration between VNX and VMware reduced administration time, freeing Denton's IT staff to focus on more critical projects.
Improved Reliability - The City of Denton has increased the reliability of its Tier 1 applications since implementing a test and development environment with VNX.
Seamless Business Continuity--VPLEX data mobility allows Denton to utilize all the resources in both its data centers for production applications, high availability and disaster recovery, while avoiding $180,000 in missed revenue per day if an outage of its billing system for city-owned utilities occurred.
Customer Challenges and Solution:
The City of Denton's NetApp storage environment was no longer providing adequate capacity and system performance. Operating under constant threat of tornados and flooding, the City of Denton also lacked a viable disaster recovery solution. With potential outages costing $180,000 per day in lost revenue from city-owned utilities, it needed a better high availability plan to avoid costly disasters.
The City of Denton replaced its underperforming NetApp, IBM and Dell Compellent storage solution with VNX running EMC's FAST(TM) Suite, including FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) and FAST Cache, to manage its Microsoft SQL, Exchange, JD Edwards ERP and Harris Northstar billing environment. To help increase reliability of its Tier 1 applications, the City of Denton created a test and development environment using VNX. Embracing a FLASH 1st strategy, the City of Denton leverages the EMC FAST Suite to ensure that active data is stored on Flash drives for maximum performance, while cold data is stored on inexpensive, high-capacity drives for optimal efficiency.
To reduce complexity and operation costs while improving system performance and availability, the City of Denton built a disaster recovery site with their reseller Cloud Caboodle. The VPLEX Metro, with its "Federated AccessAnywhere" technology, was installed at a remote data center site, enabling the City of Denton to actively share resources across both data centers and achieve complete mission critical business continuity. In addition, the City of Denton implemented a Vblock Infrastructure Platform that integrates Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) technologies, Cisco networking, EMC VNX storage and VMware vSphere virtualization in its disaster recovery facility for replication of VNX storage. Denton has also optimized efficiency by virtualizing 90% of its server infrastructure with VMware® vSphere(TM) and streamlined management with VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite and EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM).
Customer Quotes: Kevin Gunn, Director of Technology Services, City of Denton, Texas
"Because we rely on taxpayer dollars, it's very important we use technology efficiently while also delivering high-quality services to city employees and the public. VNX and the FAST Suite optimize our use of tiered disk drives and cache memory, helping boost performance without requiring us to make a huge investment in expensive disk drives. Our staff has increased their efficiency by reducing the time they spend on tedious administration tasks, allowing them to focus on more critical IT projects."
"Our previous NetApp storage array was maxed out, which resulted in our virtual servers performing poorly. Since deploying VNX with the FAST Suite, we've now seen an amazing performance increase of over 230%."
"We really like the flexibility of having iSCSI, fibre channel and NAS all in VNX's unified storage over NetApp. For example, we would need to buy additional hardware, licensing and maintenance when we wanted to add fibre channel as a backup target for our video surveillance data with NetApp. With VNX, we can easily scale to meet our IT needs without impacting performance."
"If the billing system for our city-owned utilities suffers an outage, we'd lose about $180,000 per day in missed revenue. It was clear to our elected officials that preventing a financial loss of such magnitude made EMC's VPLEX solution well worth the investment."
"Because we can freely move virtual machines and data across inter-site distances with VPLEX, we're able to fully leverage resources in both our data centers without expensive equipment sitting idle in a dark disaster recovery facility. We've achieved seamless and efficient business continuity that protects our city government from downtime around the clock."
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Orlando, Florida -- Cloud Caboodle and EMC announced last month VSPEX, a private cloud reference architecture that will compete not only against rival NetApp's FlexPod architecture, but the VCE Vblock offering which has been backed by EMC, according to sources close to the storage giant.
VSPEX is based on EMC's enterprise-class VMAX storage system, which has an advanced parallel processing technology based on the latest Intel processors, sources said. That gives VSPEX the potential power of a high-performance computing (HPC) server when married to an embedded hypervisor like VMware or Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor.
The VMAX advanced parallel processing technology, sources said, opens the door for VSPEX to do battle with Cisco’s Unified Compute System server which is at the center of the VCE partnership between EMC, Cisco and EMC’s VMware subsidiary. EMC holds the majority stake in that partnership with about a 60 percent ownership with Cisco, which has partnered closely with NetApp on FlexPod, holding about 35 percent of the company.
VSPEX sets up an enterprise battle directly between VCE and EMC’s own VSPEX, said Brian McCarthy, CTO at Cloud Caboodle, a Orlando, Florida -based solution provider and EMC partner.
"VSPEX surely will compete with Vblock,"McCarthy said. "But it furthers the process of EMC realizing they're not so focused on the storage side, and are now more focused on the cloud side."
EMC is already in the server business, McCarthy said, who noted that EMC's Isilon and Data Domain storage appliances are essentially Intel-based white box servers with the company's software inside.
Adopting a reference architecture like VSPEX is not a technology issue, but rather a political issue, McCarthy said. "The tech layer is not the issue. That part is a snap," he said. "Of more concern is the political layer, or what they should be doing. As EMC advances further into the hybrid cloud, the individual components become less important while the political ramifications become more important. The first question is, how will we do this? The second question is, should we do this? The 'how' is easy. The 'should' is harder. It disrupts alliances."
McCarthy said that he is wondering when EMC will carry this move a step further by offering cloud storage gateways like those offered by Cloud Caboodle a partner of Rackspace and Nirvanix.
"For a cloud public storage play, VSPEX doesn't seem to be the answer," he said. "VSPEX is a private cloud. I want to see EMC make a public cloud play."
Building On The VSPEX
Jamie Shepard, executive vice president of technology solutions at ABC, a Marlborough, Mass.-based solution provider and partner to both EMC and VCE, said he could see VSPEX competing with VCE Vblocks for customers who want flexibility.
"Everything being said about VSPEX is, it's the processor, the storage, the networking," Shepard said. "And it's open. VSPEX is offering choice. VCE is about raw virtual provisioning and compute power, not choice. To me, VSPEX is a VCE competitor."
Shepard said VSPEX seems to be similar to his company's Virtual Cloud Cube (vCcube) offering, which he described as am Infrastructure-as-a-Service virtualized private cloud which provides flexibility, choice, and best-of-breed technology.
The big difference, he said, is that ABC's vCcube is powered by ICI's nCubed methodology of infrastructure assessment, consulting, and enablement for planning, designing, and building clouds. "EMC doesn't have the nCubed Methodology," he said. "But it is offering customers choice. "
While channel sources expect EMC to take advantage of its architecture to move more towards the server business, it would not necessarily be to offer stand-alone servers, particularly in the commodity server market. Instead, VSPEX would be a strong platform on which customers could build private clouds.
VSPEX will likely fill a gap in between EMC's current storage-focused products and the Vblock unified storage-server-networking platform from VCE, sources said.
VCE develops solutions based on EMC storage arrays, including EMC's entry-level VNX array and its enterprise-class VMAX. That storage is married to Cisco's UCS server technology and Cisco's networking technology, and to VMware's virtualization technology in VCE's Vblocks, which are configured and built by VCE in relatively rigid configurations before being shipped to customers.
VCE is also expected to offer entry-level Vblocks based on EMC's VNXe SMB storage line, although neither VCE nor EMC has confirmed such a move.
EMC in January reported that VCE currently has an annualized run rate of about $800 million in revenue, and could soon reach the $1 billion mark.
EMC's primary storage competitor, NetApp, also works with Cisco and VMware as well as with Microsoft to develop a Vblock competitor called FlexPod. Unlike the fixed-configuration Vblock offering.
However, FlexPod is a reference architecture which provides a blueprint for solution providers to build their own converged infrastructure offerings based on specific customer requirements.
VSPEX As A Reference Architecture
Channel sources say that VSPEX will be a reference architecture that gives customers a choice of hypervisor and networking architecture, making it much more flexible than VCE's Vblocks and enabling EMC to compete on a new level with NetApp. Management will likely be provided by EMC's Ionix virtualized IT management technology.
The move to build a reference architecture is in line with what many in the channel expect is a move by Pat Gelsinger, president and COO of EMC's information infrastructure products, to take advantage of EMC storage platform's underlying server architecture. Gelsinger joined EMC in 2009 from Intel, where he served as the senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. Gelsinger was often cited as a potential heir to the CEO position at Intel.
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Orlando, Florida -- Today EMC announced enhancements to EMC® ProSphere™ storage resource management software. Now—in just 2-clicks—EMC ProSphere enables IT organizations to understand capacity usage and trends, identify issues and assess impact, and analyze performance across physical and VMware virtualized environments. EMC ProSphere now supports EMC FAST VP™ (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools), enabling customers to improve storage utilization through intuitive capacity dashboards and reporting, while proactively monitoring capacity consumption and service levels.
EMC ProSphere has extended its monitoring and alerting capabilities, which now aggregates alerts from EMC Symmetrix VMAX/VMAXe and EMC VNX unified storage arrays, and displays the context required to quickly assess the impact to meet storage service levels. EMC ProSphere enables administrators to visualize, analyze and optimize the storage environment to easily transform storage management and ensure consistent, timely, and cost-effective access to information.
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced enhancements to EMC ProSphere storage resource management software, enabling customers to understand how capacity is being used, track consumption trends to know when more storage will be required, and receive automated alerts across the storage environment to identify issues and quickly assess their impact—in just 2 clicks. The new capacity dashboards and reporting capabilities also feature new integration with EMC FAST VP. As enterprises remain focused on controlling the cost of rapid data growth, technologies like EMC ProSphere and EMC FAST VP help increase utilization, reduce storage costs, improve performance levels, and create a more agile IT environment.
ProSphere enables IT Transformation in both physical and virtual worlds, allowing customers to manage IT-as-a-Service by monitoring and analyzing service levels from end-to-end. ProSphere enables customers to:
Visualize relationships and application dependencies across physical and virtual environment: ProSphere enables users to understand the complex relationships and dependencies between applications and storage services. This includes the ability to quickly spot performance, availability and configuration issues to identify situations that could impact service levels. ProSphere's federated architecture consolidates the view to a single pane of glass across data center sites.
Analyze storage services to improve services levels: ProSphere helps customers quickly analyze and troubleshoot performance issues from the virtual guest down through the storage layers. It automatically tracks changes and analyzes compliance with configuration best practices and interoperability guidelines to ensure the environment is always configured to meet service level expectations. It also enables users to analyze alerts to quickly assess impact and take action.
Optimize the storage infrastructure: ProSphere provides customers with the tools to optimize their storage infrastructure to better control storage costs. It tracks where and how capacity is consumed by service level, location and array. It helps administrators find available and reclaimable capacity to increase utilization. Trending analysis improves planning processes to ensure the right tier of capacity, at the right time, in the right location to meet business objectives. Tight integration with FAST VP allows customers to expand their use of this technology to further optimize their investments in EMC storage.
New Integration with FAST VP
EMC FAST VP allows IT to take a policy-based approach toward delivering IT as a service. With data growing rapidly, FAST VP is being adopted (see related news release) by EMC customers because of its ability to improve performance and efficiency. New integration between ProSphere and FAST VP automatically tracks the consumption of virtual pools to identify when new capacity will be required. This facilitates just-in-time purchasing to lower storage acquisition costs. It also displays performance trends from the virtual or physical host to virtual storage devices to identify the impact of FAST VP at the application level enabling organizations to make more effective storage tiering decisions. This significantly enhances IT's ability to lower costs while meeting and or exceeding service level objectives.
ProSphere's federated and scalable architecture—with the ability to manage more than 1.1 million volumes, 36,000 SAN ports, and 18,000 hosts—is designed to scale to meet the needs of small enterprises to the world's largest data centers. ProSphere's intuitive user interface is optimized to improve productivity in growing environments that are rapidly adopting virtualization. Extensive end-to-end visualization in physical and virtual environments helps storage teams understand application to storage dependencies across their data center.
Customer Quotes
Sarel Theron, Storage Administrator, Internet Solutions
"ProSphere's user interface is clean, simple to navigate and relevant. You experience this at first logon with a dashboard that presents you with a Storage Administrator's most important information at his finger tips."
George Nye, Storage & Data Protection Services Engineer III, Hospital of Saint Raphael "The capacity views are extensive, they let me know exactly what I have, how it's used, and with the trending analysis clearly shows when I need to make the next storage purchase."
Partner Quote
Hatem Naguib, Vice President, Alliances, VMware
"ProSphere's integration with VMware vSphere® provides storage administrators with a holistic view of their storage infrastructure. Being able to quickly understand application dependencies, resource utilization and service levels—and take action in just a few clicks—is important. ProSphere in a VMware environment will enable customers to control the cost of storage while improving storage levels."
Industry Analyst Quote
Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
"As enterprise customers' virtual environments flourish, they need an SRM solution—like EMC ProSphere--that assures storage service levels across the virtual infrastructure, controls the cost of capacity growth, and optimizes storage services to align with business objectives."
EMC Executive Quote
Jay Mastaj, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMC Infrastructure Management Group
"Our customers' biggest challenge today is controlling the costs of rapid data growth, while ensuring consistent service levels in both physical and virtual environments. EMC is committed to helping customers transform their IT infrastructures, and a huge piece of this is managing growth while reducing complexity. The new capacity dashboards and reporting in ProSphere will enhance customers' ability to control the costs of rapid data growth. Integration with VMware and FAST VP will help organizations get the most of their investments in EMC storage as they expand their use of virtualization. And, the new monitoring capabilities will allow organizations to understand the health and performance of their storage infrastructure."
For more information call us at: (800) 557-6540
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