EMC and IBM recently launched storage products with the term “elastic” in their names. These announcements were significant for the companies and for the IT community in understanding a direction being taken for storage technology.
EMC launched Elastic Cloud Storage that incorporates ViPR 2.0 software onto three models of hardware platforms. The hardware consists of commodity x86 servers, Ethernet networking, and JBODs with high capacity disk drives. ViPR 2.0 brings support for block, object, and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocol storage.
IBM’s Elastic Storage is an amalgam of IBM software solutions led by General Parallel File System (GPFS) and all the advanced technology features it provides. The announcement included server-side caching and a future delivery of the SoftLayer Swift open source software. In addition, IBM Research developed StoreLets that allow software to be run at the edge (storage nodes in Swift) to accelerate data selection and reduce the amount of data transferred.
