EMC Unveils VPLEX For Federated Storage

Storage vendor EMC introduced a product line designed to facilitate private clouds for enterprise storage on Monday at the EMC World 2010 conference in Boston.

EMC describes its VPLEX technology as “distributed storage federation,” a layer of abstraction between storage arrays and servers that allows data to be transparently pooled and shared across multiple devices and data centers within an enterprise.

“VPLEX technology will enable follow-the-sun computing, the relocating of workloads to low-cost energy regions or moving them out of the way of approaching storms,” said Patrick Gelsinger, president and COO, EMC Information Infrastructure Products, in a press release. “In general, IT environments will be more dynamic and flexible than ever before."

The EMC VPLEX family currently consists of “VPLEX Local,” which enables virtualized storage within a single data center; and “VPLEX Metro,” which creates a single virtualized storage resource across two data centers located within 100 kilometers of each other.

EMC VPLEX Local provides transparent data mobility within, across and between EMC and non-EMC storage platforms within a single site or data center.

EMC VPLEX Metro includes the ability to link two separate VPLEX clusters within a data center or between two nearby data centers, presenting “stretched” volumes as if they were local, shared volumes. VPLEX Metro is designed to work in conjunction with leading virtualization technologies including VMware vSphere clusters for Microsoft, SAP and Oracle applications; Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Live Migration; and Oracle VM 2.2.

In 2011, the company will release VPLEX Geo, which will enable asynchronous movement of data between two data centers located outside of the 100 kilometer radius. Then, in 2012, VPLEX Global will enable asynchronous federated storage across multiple data centers globally.

EMC announced two customers along with the launch. AOL has deployed more than 10 EMC VPLEX virtual storage clusters at data centers in the U.S. and in Germany to help manage "several petabytes of storage capacity used by applications running on thousands of servers,” said Will Stevens, Senior Director of Storage Operations at AOL, in a statement.

Melbourne IT is using EMC VPLEX "as a virtual data center without being constrained by geographic boundaries,” said Glenn Gore, CTO in a statement . “We can use VPLEX to instantly remap the storage and reroute the data load. As the load shifts from data center to data center, VPLEX allows us the flexibility to continually keep adjusting our virtual storage platform to meet the load growth.”