On Monday at EMC World, I had the opportunity to sit down with Ed Beauvais, EMC’s Director of Isilon Product Marketing. Ed was gracious enough to agree to be interviews for the MiniCast. We talked about new features in Isilon OneFS 8.0 and how they fit into EMC’s “Edge to Core to Cloud” message.

At one point in the interview, it appears that Ed and I confused each other about CloudPools functionality. Ed and I chatted about that after the 15-minute time limit and cleared it up pretty quickly. Turns out we were talking about two similar but different things.

Ed was saying that CloudPools does not, at this time, allow you to use an IsilonSD Edge virtual instance running in the Cloud as your remote tier. I neither confirm or deny whether or not that functionality is on the Isilon roadmap. (No, seriously, I can’t. Sometimes I use that phrase to be cute and let folks know that I know something I’m not allowed to talk about yet, but in this case I can’t tell you anything because I really don’t know. Ed gave me nothing on this one at all…)

What I was talking about was using a physical Isilon cluster at another site as your remote CloudPools tier. That is supported, and can be done today.

With that clarification in mind, take a listen to Ed and I talking Isilon.