This past week, EMC had a record-breaking event in NYC, where they announced a number of new products and features. The announcements focused mainly around VNX and VNXe, as well as Symmetrix. However, the company also went into detail as to how some of the newer acquisitions would fit into their overall portfolio. The company’s plans for Isilon (acquisition discussed by @reichmanIT here:  http://bit.ly/bNrVKz) was perhaps more interesting. This was one of EMC’s best acquisitions, as it gave it the capabilities needed for scale-out NAS. In conjunction with the rest of its portfolio, EMC is positioned to capture new markets not traditionally recognized in, provided the portfolio is integrated seamlessly. It also points to many changes we see occurring in the data center today.

Back at the ranch (the ranch being Forrester), we have been focusing on Optimizing Your Data Center for Cloud Economics, which is one of our core success imperatives for I/O professionals this year. With market dynamics changing for many industries today, it’s necessary for I/O teams to create an efficient infrastructure environment flexible enough to be on demand and enable a business’s competitive advantage. My colleague (ok, my boss) @rwhiteley0 will go more into this on our webinar on February 1; feel free to register here:  http://bit.ly/hzFSbX. Scale-out NAS solutions like those of Isilon enable storage to become much more flexible, allowing for both performance and efficiency. The amount of file data is growing exponentially, and businesses don’t want to, and shouldn’t have to, control the amount of data that’s being consumed. "Big data" or things such as multimedia, social networking, video, large-scale VDI/server virtualization deployments, new trading platforms, all high performance, bandwidth intensive applications are part of a business’s competitive initiatives going forward. Scale-out technology like Isilon’s is designed to create storage environments that automatically optimize performance based on usage patterns, allowing nodes to be deployed using different performance and density profiles for various file data. This will allow for I/O professionals to be able to automate a number of manual tasks, provide the necessary resources to each line of business’s requirements, while still remaining efficient. Nirvana right? 

Efficiency, automation, performance. . . all words that transform what IT looks like today. It’s necessary to understand that in order to achieve the right balance of economics, it’s necessary to deploy the right tools and processes within each area of the IT environment.  Storage inefficiency is very costly, and in order to avoid sacrificing performance, innovative ways of managing efficiency and performance must be implemented. Best practices and choosing the right combination of storage solutions for the appropriate workloads is critical to creating that efficiency.