Verizon Communications announced plans to expand its relationship with EMC that helps Verizon customers make the business transition to cloud services. Verizon Labs currently uses EMC to provide scalable virtualized block and object-based storage services.
As traditional storage models move from physical storage to virtual – or software-defined -- storage, applications are accessing data or virtual disks as opposed to physical disks. Compared to rigid hardware, software-defined storage's inherent flexibility improves the use of storage resources as well as enables quicker upgrades and changes.
EMC said it enables commercial software to work with open source software to improve scalability, performance and reliability. Virtualized storage plays an important role in Verizon's go-to-market strategy by speeding up delivery of applications and services to its customers.
EMC is integrating its commercial storage software with the open source Apache Mesos technology, as well as with the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS), for easier and more effective data center management. This approach allows Verizon Labs to operate a virtualized data center by managing distributed applications on large clusters of geographically distributed computers.
Kumar Vishwanathan, vice president and chief technologist for product strategy and development, Verizon Labs
With cloud-based data storage like EMC's, Verizon gains adaptability and intelligent data management, which are integral to our cloud strategy. Software-defined storage overcomes the restrictions of hard-wired architecture and delivers the benefits needed in today's dynamic datacenter environment.
Sam Grocott, senior vice president of product management and marketing, emerging technologies for EMC
With this state-of-the-art software-defined datacenter technology, built on EMC's ScaleIO and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) offerings, we expect Verizon Labs to increase datacenter efficiencies in addition to gaining massive scale. EMC partnered closely with Verizon to deploy this simpler architecture to help support their cloud service strategy.
