Data Analytics Solution for Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage

Alluxio (formerly Tachyon), developers of the system that unifies data at memory speed, today announced a solution with Alluxio Enterprise Edition (AEE) and Dell EMC’s Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) for big data workloads. The new solution is designed to help Dell EMC ECS enterprise customers deliver more value from data as they transition their businesses to meet the new demands of a digital economy.

“Global 2000 enterprises are pushing their data centers to become digital growth engines to expand software development capabilities and enable faster innovation and deeper insights from data,” said Manuvir Das, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Advanced Software Division, Dell EMC. “Integration with Alluxio helps us meet customer demand for more flexibility and higher performance in big data workload analytics.”

Alluxio provides a unified view of enterprise data that spans disparate storage systems, locations and clouds, allowing any big data compute framework to access stored data at memory speed. Alluxio runs critical workloads in Global 2000 companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, Barclay's Bank, CERN, ESRI, Huawei, Intel, and Juniper, among others.

The Dell EMC ECS platform provides enterprise grade storage with Exabyte scale that helps businesses to realize rapid and wide scale digital transformation of their data centers with faster time to market and improved total cost of ownership (TCO). Flexibility and efficiency in data handling and multi-protocol support allows ECS to break down data silos while accelerating analytics workloads.

This new solution gives customers a compelling alternative to DAS-based storage products by providing the benefits of ECS together with the performance enhancements from Alluxio’s AEE software.

“Today's high-performance applications demand real-time responses and our integration with Dell EMC ECS gives customers new levels of performance in big data analytic workloads,” said Haoyuan Li, Alluxio CEO. “Alluxio gives Dell EMC ECS customers total flexibility to use any compute framework to access disparate storage systems on premise and in the cloud at memory speeds.”

Digital disruption is shaking up all types of organization in all industries. In a recent Dell Technologies study, almost half (48 percent) of global business leaders from mid-size to large enterprises confessed they don’t know what their industry will look like in three years. However, companies are struggling to evolve their data centers, with 69 percent saying they are being held back by too many traditional applications. They are challenged with reducing sprawl and spend, while bringing systems up-to-date. 

As a modern storage platform, Dell EMC ECS is aimed at helping businesses transform their datacenters by realizing faster time to market and compelling cloud economics. With ECS, organizations can not only embrace cloud-native applications that directly enable digital transformation, but can also optimize their existing, traditional IT investments. ECS manages workloads for traditional and next-generation applications with unmatched storage efficiency, resiliency, and simplicity. With an active-active architecture, ECS provides strong consistency across geographies allowing for reliable geo-distributed multisite analytics.  HDFS support allows for more efficient compute to storage interface and independent scaling of storage and compute. Deployable in clusters for petabyte and exabyte scalability, ECS is available as a turnkey appliance, as ECS software that can be deployed on industry-standard hardware or as a fully Dell EMC-managed ECS-as-a-Service. 

Alluxio proves its value in production scenarios where customers need to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time. It overcomes I/O limitations for running big data workloads that access remote storage systems and allows big data workloads to share data at memory speed for orders of magnitude higher performance in running jobs.