EMC Federation Bolsters Big Data Playbook With New Data Lakes Solution

The EMC Federation Monday unveiled a big data hardware and software solution called the Federation Business Data Lake, aimed at giving partners and businesses the ability to collect, house and analyze data. It is the first so-called data lake solution from EMC.

EMC said the solution marries existing products including offerings from EMC Information Infrastructure as well as VMware vCloud Suite, Pivotal Big Data Suite and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. The solution, available starting in April, supports both Cloudera and Hortonworks software Hadoop distributions.

EMC channel partners said the Federation Business Data Lake will allow them to avoid sometimes weeks of integration to develop comparable solutions and instead go to market at lightning speed. For its part, EMC, Hopkinton, Mass., said the solution can be installed in as little as a week.

[Related: The History (So Far) Of The EMC Federation]

"It has been extremely time-consuming to deploy these type of solutions to our customers," said Jamie Shepard, senior vice president of strategy and health care at Lumenate, a Dallas-based solution provider and EMC partner. "By pulling together best-of-breed solutions from EMC and building a go-to-market product that can easily be deployed, I can help customers realize their data value faster."

Key components of the Federation Business Data Lake include a Store feature for housing unstructured and structured data in a unified data "lake" for comparative analysis. The solution also will leverage advanced algorithms to mine data for predictive patterns along with a Surface tool that more easily allows data to be presented to users and other applications. The Federation Business Data Lake also incorporates what it calls an Act feature that allows users to implement "real-time" changes to data that help businesses consider different outcomes.

The combined product offering comes as the EMC Federation has faced challenges from outside investors and friction from within. EMC investor Elliott Management had been pushing for the Federation to split as a way to improve shareholder value. In January, EMC and Elliott Management agreed on a truce. In November, EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci also publicly stated that bringing together some overlapping technologies being developed under the overall EMC umbrella had caused some friction between the various parts of the company.

Shepard said he was undisturbed by reports of EMC Federation squabbles. "EMC is a solid partner," he said. "We go to market with EMC because it is a company that is innovative, evolving with the industry and addressing customer needs."

PUBLISHED MARCH 23, 2015