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EMC gears up for digital citizens

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Las Vegas, 06 May 2015

EMC is gearing up for digital systems and is updating its flash technology as the rate of data consumption surges.

By 2020, there will be seven billion people connected to the Internet, 30 billion connected devices, and 44 zettabytes (44 billion terabytes) of data produced a year, said EMC Information Infrastructure CEO David Goulden, speaking at EMC World 2015, in Las Vegas this week. In contrast, in 2012, 2.8 zettabytes of data was created.

"We used to categorise generations by the technologies that happened within those years," said Goulden, delivering the keynote address at the conference. "Such as the Filofax and mobile phone for the Baby Boomers, all the way to Generation Z, with wearable technologies and the Internet of things."

However, he explained there is a growing global community of digital citizens from all generations that form the Information Generation.

Digital citizens are defined as individuals that are always connected and engaged online, and have the world's information at their fingertips. EMC recently released a report entitled "The Information Generation: Transforming the Future, Today". The study detailed what consumers are coming to expect from modern-day companies.

Admitting he is himself, a digital citizen, Goulden gave an example of a typical day in his life which will see him use at least five different cloud-based applications on his smartphone, such as Uber, the taxi service that connects drivers to passengers, and Munchery to order dinner on his way home.

"We are not going backwards, only forwards" as more and more people become comfortable using mobile, social and cloud, Goulden said. As a result, EMC believes companies need to find ways to deal with the vast amounts of data that will be coming over the next five years.

Changing environment

Stuart Macgregor, CEO of Real IRM Solutions, said earlier this year the pace of change is accelerating "rapidly" across sectors in the new connected world. "Companies ... are being asked to reinvent themselves continually in order to survive. It is against this backdrop that there is more of a reliance on IT architectures to enable these rapid shifts in business strategy."

Eric Burgener, research director at IDC, noted: "The data centre of the future has to be agile, built around IT infrastructure technology that supports the speed at which enterprises need to adapt and respond to dynamic business conditions."

Burgener notes: "This has specific implications for storage in these environments, requiring high performance, broad scalability and flexibility, extremely high availability and an ability to easily integrate into evolving data centre workflows."

XtremIO 4.0

In a bid to offer a solution to cater to the pace of change, EMC this week announced a software update to its all-flash scale-out enterprise storage array, the XtremIO. The update is version four and has been nicknamed "The Beast" because of its advanced capabilities.

Guy Churchward, president of EMC Core Technologies, said: "Just like Tesla releases an update and your car goes faster, we are moving in the same direction."

Updates included in XtremIO 4.0 are enhanced data protection, online expansion, application automation, multi-array management, a more powerful interface and the ability to become more scalable. The update also supports a new 40TB X-Brick building block which is double the density of previous XtremIO systems.

"With XtremIO 4.0, we've boosted that solid foundation with scale and data services that truly transform not just the speed at which applications run, but the entire way in which they're deployed," said Churchward.

The XtremIO 4.0 software, along with 40TB X-Brick configurations, will be available by June.

(Lauren Kate Rawlins is in Las Vegas courtesy of EMC.)

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