Data cannot be confined to four walls of data center

Sonal Desai

EMC has taken on a new gamble. Even as the CXOs are weary about the concept of the data lake in the first instance, the storage major has announced a new strategy surrounding the technology, and named is Data Lake 2.0

Drivers:
Admitting that the concept of the data like did not take-off as planned initially, Gautam Mehandru, Senior Director, Global Sales Strategy, Isilon Storage Division, EMC, said, “The trends have changed. Data continues to grow, IT budgets though not flat, continue to be on a lower side, and the workforce is increasingly becoming global.”

On the other end, data has increased from 1.2 petabytes (PB) in Q32014 to 1.7 PB in Q32015. Data therefore cannot be confined into the four walls of the data center. Addressing this spike in data, some CIOs have started moving their frozen data in data lakes. And figures are proving the uptake. “We have more than 6,500 Isilon customers globally, more than 200 in India and the customer base is growing QoQ,” Mehandru said.

Take for instance the telecom and retail segments. Both the vertical generate a lot of customer data which can be used to offer customized services and packages to not only retain customers, but also to offer customer delight.

EMC aims to target Indian multinationals as well as MNCs with these new offerings.

The new offerings:
The company has launched a new generation of Isilon scale-out NAS to support its Data Lake 2.0 strategy that expands core data lake capabilities to the enterprise edge (remote offices) and the cloud, with its new software-defined storage product, IsilonSD Edge.

Close on the heels is a new next-generation EMC Isilon OneFS operating system to optimize unstructured data storage at the core of the data lake.

The third offering is the EMC Isilon CloudPools, In addition to solutions focused on the core and edge, EMC is also offering EMC CloudPools, a policy-based tool to archive frozen data to either public, private or hybrid clouds.

IsilonSD Edge will support VMware ESX and be fully integrated with VMware vCenter for ease of management. IsilonSD Edge will support OneFS’s data services and protocols while scaling up to 36TB, seamlessly replicating data to and distributing it from the core. IsilonSD Edge will be free for non-production use and licensed per cluster for production use.

Much of all data within the enterprise is cold data—data rarely in use — that needs to be retained for regulatory and compliance purposes. CloudPools will allow Isilon to tier data natively to public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Virtustream without requiring a cloud gateway. CloudPools also enables data center expansion to EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) and Isilon as a private cloud.

Why should CIOs look at data lakes?
According to EMC, the following three reasons should compel the CIOs to consider data lakes.

•    The product is freely downloadable (atleast till it goes into production), and can run on any commodity hardware
•    Turns conversation from Capex to Opex
•    Enables organizations to monetize data

“Fourthly, and most importantly, lines of businesses (LoBs) are by-passing the IT organizations—they think IT is too slow. Thereby, they go and open a new instance with either a new services provider or on cloud, creating yet another heterogeneous layer for the IT to manage. With the data lake, IT can not only immediately cater to the demands from various LoBs, but as a business owner, can provide value to the internal stake holders,” Mehandru explained.