Customers should be relieved to discover that EMC Corp.’s looming merger with Dell Inc. isn’t distracting the leadership team from product development, at least not for the time being. The company is pulling back the curtains on a new iteration of the software powering its Isilon series of network-attached storage arrays today that has been reworked from the bottom up to address a broader range of use cases. 

Providing the groundwork for the update is a set of reliability improvements aimed at reducing the amount of downtime involved in maintenance operations such as implementing system updates and reversing data corruption. The less time an array is rendered unavailable during the process, the faster end-users can carry on with their day. But as big of a priority as that is, administrators will likely be more interested in the other major addition that is rolling out in conjuction.

The new CloudPools option introduces the ability to bolster on-premise capacity with storage space from popular infrastructure-as-a-service platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s rivaling Azure. EMC says that the feature theoretically makes it possible to exceed the 50-petabyte ceiling of Isilon clusters when there is too much data to fit inside an deployment, enabling the platform to accommodate even the largest Hadoop implementations.

In practice, however, customers will probably use the integration on much smaller scales for transaction logs and other infrequently accessed information that costs more to store on-premise than in one of the major providers’ ultra-cheap archiving services. CloudPools is one of two new options that EMC is offering to organizations looking to reduce their storage expenses, with the other being a standalone version of the Isilon operating system that can be deployed on low-cost commodity hardware.

EMC sees IsilonSD Edge finding use mainly at branch locations with fairly modest data requirements that can’t justify the cost of a full-blown appliance. Deployments of the software can be controlled through VMware Inc.’s virtualization management software and scaled at small 36-terabyte increments when additional capacity is required. It’s slated to become available in the first of half of next year alongside the new CloudPools feature.

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