New Version of EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance

EMC Corporation announced the availability of the latest version of its Cloud Tiering Appliance, which provides secure and efficient archiving and tiering to public clouds.

By transparently tiering inactive files to the public cloud or archive storage, EMC VNX customers can reclaim valuable primary storage, reduce CapEx costs, lower OpEx costs and reduce backup requirements – all with no impact on end users. New enhancements to the Cloud Tiering Appliance make it more secure and more cost effective to leverage the public cloud as an archive destination by providing built-in efficiency and protection capabilities, improved flexibility and choice to customers and expanded scalability.

CTA enables EMC VNX customers to further optimize their primary storage by extending their FLASH 1st tiering strategy. They can leverage the VNX FAST Suite to automatically tier data within the array to the most appropriate drive type based on activity and utilize Cloud Tiering Appliance to tier stale, unstructured data off the array to a public cloud or EMC archive storage such as Atmos, Data Domain, Centera, Isilon or VNX. With a FLASH 1st strategy, data is stored on the most cost effective drive type within VNX and the most cost-effective storage tier within the entire storage environment driving down TCO. In addition to RSA technology used for key management for encrypted data, Xeon X5 processor technology from Intel supports the new expanded scalability of Cloud Tiering Appliance.

Technology Highlights:
The latest version of CTA adds the following capabilities to existing benefits, including reducing CapEx by optimizing primary storage; lowering OpEx through automated tiering; and, reducing backup timing by reducing the amount of data for backup:  

• Security: Built-in encryption and RSA key management technology provides security for data-at-rest, mitigating concerns with regard to storing data in the public cloud.
• Efficiency: New compression feature enables users to optimize bandwidth usage, resulting in reduced costs and better performance tiering to public cloud.
• Choice and Flexibility: In addition to supporting the Atmos ecosystem of 40 different public cloud providers in more than 70 global locations, CTA now provides the option to tier to Amazon S3 public cloud, offering choice for leveraging cloud storage.
• Scalability: CTA tiers up to 500 million files per appliance or virtual environment – a 100% increase over the previous version. This scalability means that customers can meet today’s IT needs while planning for tomorrow’s challenges.

Audrius Polikatis, Ph.D, CIO, University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, said: "We had an initiative to investigate the best option for introducing cloud to our NAS environment in a non-disruptive manner. After careful investigation Cloud Tiering Appliance was our answer. Cloud Tiering Appliance has allowed us to tier to Atmos cloud from our unified storage, freeing space on our unified storage and making backups more manageable. The best part is that, with the retrieval speed, the medical staff has no idea their files have been archived. It’s just business as usual."

Simon Walters, managed services director, MTI Technology Limited, said: "We are excited about the value we can provide our customers with the new encryption and compression features of Cloud Tiering Appliance. With these features, archiving as a service to public cloud will become a core part of our business strategy."

Eric Herzog, SVP, Product Management and Product Marketing, EMC Unified Storage Division, said: "EMC has long recognized the value of the cloud – and this latest version of CTA alleviates the challenges of public cloud storage, while providing options for the public cloud. The new encryption, compression, and scalability features directly impact IT’s bottom line by extending customers’ FLASH 1st strategies and future-proofing their storage assets."