Unable to make it to EMC World in Las Vegas this year? One of our Solutions Architects, Roger Mellman, was there and brought back a few key developments and takeaways we’d like to share with you.

• EMC announced that storage is a software-defined service, which means that enterprise data center storage is being redefined by software that sits on commodity hardware. EMC’s mission is to offer customers the ability to manage information and information assets through their product ViPR.
• ViPR is a contiguous, enterprise persistent data fabric which sits above the physical storage solutions and allows customers a “seamless” migration to a hybrid cloud model.
• Focus on the 3^rd platform or Platform as a Service. EMC solutions specifically targeting 1^st and 2^nd platform is a closed approach, gearing up to provide options to accommodate the application layer for future IT.
• Data Protection and Disaster Recovery through backups and replication appeared as a stepping stone for cloud services.
• Flash, Flash, Flash…faster is better, there were numerous sessions on speeding up data access.
• EMC and VMware labs this year were absolutely amazing and continue to improve over the last 3 years. Instructor-led labs offered people who were hesitant to participate in prior labs the chance to get involved.