EMC Talks Storage Network Future

EMC (NYSE: EMC) is working on massive, global storage networking technology that the company claims moves well beyond its Atmos cloud storage platform.

In a presentation by EMC storage and security division president Pat Gelsinger and a blogby Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis, EMC outlined its vision for a globally distributed storage network that overcomes limitations of latency, bandwidth and data consistency.

The executives suggested that the vision could soon become a product, promising more details at EMC World in May.

In his blog, Hollis said one possibility for such a network would be “to seriously consider moving thousands of VMsover thousands of miles. Or you could easily play the market on energy costs by moving workloads to where they’re most efficient to run.”

Big data centers could be created from smaller ones, and information placed closer to users, he said, and applications could be moved to avoid downtime.

Atmos, Hollis wrote, is “somewhat constrained to data with low-to-moderate change rate — not to mention requiring applications that can bridge to objectmodels.”

EMC’s vision, Hollis said, is a “more generic block-level abstraction that can handle high I/Orates and not limit the choice of apps.”

Read the rest at Enterprise Storage Forum.