EMC releases yet ANOTHER rack-scale server SAN

Biz claims no overlap at all with its bazillions of similar boxen

'See all those other similar-looking boxes? They're COMPLETELY DIFFERENT'

EMC's evangelising president Chad Sakac says that ScaleIO Node does not compete with hyper-converged appliances, such as VSPEX Blue or VxRack.

He blogs: "Its closest relative isn’t a VxRack, but rather an Isilon node. Another less close relative is a VSAN-Ready Node."

He admits there is increased product overlap inside EMC with ScaleIO Node: "It’s disruptive. It can be used in a ton of cases where people use EMC stuff (and non-EMC stuff) today."

Contrasted to VNX and VMAX, ScaleIO Node has more granular scalability – pay-as-you-grow, so to speak – and greater scale through being scale-out rather than scale-up. It will probably be cheaper to operate, as well. If you are going to run application software on ScaleIO Node, then sizing its compute resource for both storage and compute will need careful work.

ScaleIO Node management screen

Compared to VSAN, the server SAN offering from EMC's 80-per-cent-owned subsidiary VMware, ScaleIO Node is hypervisor-agnostic and probably more scalable, whereas VSAN is focussed exclusively on vSphere. ScaleIO Node is not intended for heavy compute work as well as storage.

Sakac said: "The ScaleIO Node is completely missing the management and orchestration stack to manage that, update it, and otherwise make it a Hyper-Converged compute thing (including the support model) – it is a storage thing, not a hyper-converged compute thing... if what you need is a hyper-converged compute thing... it’s VxRack or VSPEX Blue, depending on scale."

ScaleIO – VxRack continuum

He continued: "When it comes to turnkey Hyper-Converged appliances, VSPEX Blue and its roadmap is our answer. It’s simple, it’s turnkey, and it’s performant and feature rich [with] a total focus on vSphere and VSAN."

He added: "If you want a rack-scale model that can scale to thousands of nodes and you’re an enterprise data centre (which is typically pretty heterogenous), VxRack (including, but not limited to the EVO SDDC Suite persona – and the higher level curated workflows and ecosystem in the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud stack) is the answer."

He concluded: "If you want a rack-scale model that can scale to thousands of nodes and it’s for a pure cloud-native app use case, VxRack with the Photon Platform and Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the answer."

It seems to us that there is a lot of product overlap with ScaleIO Node. Sakac indicates where each product should be used and asserts that there is no internal competition. For him, overlap does not equal competition in this case.

"So, does this compete with VSPEX Blue? NO. So, does this compete with VxRack? NO," Sakac said.

ScaleIO Node will be generally available in Q1 2016, having limited (directed) availability now. Explore the software here. ®