VMWare and EMC – startegic partnerships

(No Ratings Yet)

It seems that a lot of hardware companies are making strategic partnerships to provide solutions oriented towards infrastructure as a cloud. VMWare and EMC especially have introduced a few new products oriented towards traditional database platforms that make a things simple and a lot more attractive. EMC’s vFabric product does just that – imagine being able to provision a database instance – CPU, memory and then restore a backup, set expiration, manage storage and so on  in a matter of minutes. EMC has also mentioned their latest storage products – called Lightning that utilizes flash.   There solution is running on commodity hardware, unlike Oracle Exa – series, with VMWare and EMC proprietary software.  Pat Gelsinger, COO of EMC,  continued talking about EMC’s Big Data product – Greenplum database and provided an example of how massive amounts of data, coming from structural and unstructured  sources like Facebook, Youtube can be analyzed reported on to provide a SocialGraph view of an individual.  It did look very pretty and fast on the screen and if it does really work – the days of Minority Report type of advertising are within the reach of insurance and retail companies.

The main highlights of the EMC offering are:

• Optimize workload execution
• Fully automated storage tiering
• Use of High performance commodity servers for cloud
• Ligttning enabled products – flashcards and software that uses it. Increase of IOPS.
• Big data -> driving business , enterprise data will grow 50x times

With Amazon EC2 and Database.com being out there already, we should see a lot more vendor partnerships and consolidation on the hardware market.