EMC today extended Isilon's Data Lake storage model, announcing three new software products aimed at expanding the reach of an organization's scale-out NAS pool. The company calls it Data Lake 2.0.

First up. EMC IsilonSD Edge is a software-defined NAS system that can be deployed on commodity hardware via EMC subsidiary VMware's ESX enterprise server virtualization platform. It's designed as "edge" storage for remote offices that require easy data exchange with an organization's core storage pool. IsilonSD Edge supports the OneFS operating system's data services and protocols and can be scaled up to 36 TB per location, EMC said. The software will be free for non-production use and licensed for production on a per-cluster basis.

Meanwhile, the launch of EMC CloudPools is intended to allow storage to be easily extended to both public and private clouds. CloudPools will be used to tier encrypted "cold data" (data that must to be retained but rarely needs to be accessed) to public cloud services without a cloud gateway, as well as to private cloud storage via EMC's Elastic Cloud Storage and Isilon. This will allow users to get past the current 50 PB limit on a single Isilon cluster today, the company said. Supported public cloud providers include Virtustream, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The core Isilon OneFS operating system is also getting a next-generation version with an update supporting non-disruptive upgrades across major code families as well as rollback capabilities.

Pricing of the new offerings won't be announced until they are made generally available in "early 2016," EMC said.

In other news, tech site Re/code reported that "Dell insiders" are worried about the tax implications of the company's proposed takeover of EMC. Specifically, there are concerns that Dell's use of a "tracking stock" linked to EMC subsidiary VMware to help finance the purchase will be flagged by the IRS as a taxable distribution of shares. Re/code said that would require that Dell borrow more money to reimburse EMC shareholders — or it could keep the deal from happening at all.