EMC outlines plans for a virtual IT company

EMC has been reinforcing its cloud strategies

Storage firm EMC has put forward its view of cloud computing, and demonstrated how a tightly knit three-way partnership between VMware, EMC and Cisco, named VCE, is going to transform virtual datacentres.

The company outlined two reinforcing cloud strategies at its EMC World event in Florida, one concerning information infrastructure and another focused on virtual infrastructure.

The first vision includes EMC's content management division led by Mark Lewis, who said in his keynote address that cost-effective and fast deployment of information management processes rests on application composition.

Lewis explained that EMC would continue to expand its solutions for composite applications, building on the recently announced xCelerated Composition Platform which allows customers to build function-specific applications with little custom coding.

"Less customisation means that applications can be developed up to 50 per cent faster, which results in significant costs savings, faster time to value and greater return on investment," he told attendees.

However, the dimension of the information infrastructure strategy EMC really pushed at the event was the storage management side.

The company launched an online version of its Atmos cloud storage service designed to give customers more flexibility while managing the growth in storage demand.

Customers can move, or 'federate', from on-premise to online Atmos clouds, depending on how much information they feel safe storing on the internet. Data leakage prevention policies derived from EMC's RSA division will allow customers to tag information according to where they want it to be stored.

EMC chief executive and chairman Joe Tucci claimed that Atmos had a more " advanced policy" than EMC's main competitor in the space, Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service), because it is now available to customers as software or as a service.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Woo, an enterprise storage analyst at IDC, suggested that Atmos would strike the right balance for many IT organisations because they can buy as much storage as they need, when they need it. "EMC has made it easy for customers to dip their toes in the water," he said.

Woo added that Atmos Online will also save customers from being tied to the terms and conditions of one particular service provider.

"Service providers often keep their customers for life because it takes so much time and effort to move data to another service cloud," he said.

However, EMC's service provider partners are less happy with the new offering. A representative from one of EMC's closest partners complained that the move to allow customers to build their own private clouds with Atmos had come unexpectedly, and would result in a significant loss of business at their end. The representative said that he would be meeting with senior EMC storage executives next week to discuss the issues.

EMC's main topic of discussion at the event was its Private Cloud Computing virtual infrastructure strategy.

A private cloud hints at the on-demand nature of the software-as-a-service model that IT organisations have grown accustomed to, in which service providers supply solutions for the IT organisations to manage. But EMC said that its concept is fundamentally different. Virtualisation is paramount to the infrastructure of the private cloud model, in that it allows IT departments to run virtual datacentres as a service themselves.

Chuck Hollis, chief technology officer for global marketing at EMC, said that, although private clouds are enabled by virtual datacentres, the terms are not interchangeable.

"There is a subtle difference between the two. A cloud happens quickly. It is a service: a low touch, low operational environment that is self-balancing to give users what they want, i.e. straight-through processing," Hollis said. " Whereas a virtual datacentre is a bunch of servers run by IT who need to turn the knobs."

Ed Bugnion, chief technology officer for server access and virtualisation at Cisco, suggested that the biggest internal cloud might be that being developed by the US Defence Information Systems Agency. The department said in April that it would make its datacentre act more like a cloud in order to deploy and test software itself, and speed up innovation.

Bugnion noted that the move would also cut down on inefficiency. The amount of bureaucracy in government departments means that IT has to plan resources far in advance, and often many of these resources go unused. He also believes that the public sector is likely to embrace the private cloud before the enterprise.

EMC and VMware, meanwhile, have unveiled new technologies over the past few weeks that enable virtual datacentres and private cloud computing.

EMC introduced the new Symmetrix V-Max high-end storage system in April, with an architecture that can support thousands of virtual servers. VMware, meanwhile, unveiled vSphere, which it describes as an operating system for building private clouds.

VMware chief executive Paul Maritz took to the EMC World stage with Tucci to identify the opportunities he believes VSphere will bring to customers.

Many IT departments are misled into believing that the cloud is infinitely scalable and flexible because of the ease with which Google launches clouds, according to Maritz.

"But while Google can do it because it writes highly customisable applications, enterprises do not have that luxury," he said. "VSphere takes the application away from the middleware and operating system, and ties it to new software to introduce the benefits of the cloud."

Maritz then told attendees that the new offering marked an end to VMware's involvement in the individual hypervisor market.

"We are now in the business of stitching together software that allows you to aggregate computer resources more efficiently," he said.

"By and large, new applications are no longer being written to traditional operating systems. The new frameworks that people are programming allow us to find out in a much more natural way what the application is doing, and we can then use the information to make management better and use underlying resources - whether it's servers, networks or storage - more efficiently because we have deeper insight into the application."

Further expanding the concept of intelligent clouds, EMC introduced Project Zoka which it said would allow organisations to move the most complicated applications, compliance models and service level agreements to the cloud.

And a joint presentation between VMware, EMC and Cisco saw the firms put forward what they believe will become a "dominant model" for the cloud industry.

"We are all agreed that we have to give customers a virtual IT company going forward," said EMC's Hollis.

The model will involve EMC supplying the scalable storage and information management disciplines for backup and archiving, and RSA's security expertise, while Cisco will provide the networking products, such as the Nexus 1000v virtual switch, and VMware the software on top, most importantly vSphere.

Cisco's recently launched Unified Computing System will also complement the model, providing an optimised hosting platform for virtual machines that unifies servers, storage, networking and virtualisation.

However, the key question put to the company representatives was where Microsoft's expertise fits in with their vision. Microsoft has been VMware's main competitor in the hypervisor market since launching Hyper-V last June.

Hollis implied that Microsoft was not ready to join the partnership. "We all have ecosystem partners, but the key to this is getting virtualisation technology that scales, and at the moment we can't get that from Microsoft," he said.

Such comments could come as a surprise to those who attended a New York chief information officer summit on 3 February when Tucci and Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer announced that their strategic alliance would become " broader" and "deeper" to address customer requirements around virtualisation.

The comments from VMware in response to the Microsoft question were less unexpected. "For Microsoft to be up here, they have to get out of their Windows base and two-dimensional paradigms," said Parag Patal, vice president of alliances at VMware.

Cisco's answer was more diplomatic. "We are a big partner with Microsoft, but we came up with a common vision because we have a common business model," said Bugnion, adding that Cisco's alliance with Microsoft is in service delivery.

Chuck concluded that, although many companies are hesitant to deploy a private cloud because the technology is so new and "architects are paid to be conservative by nature", he had noticed a mood change throughout the industry in recent weeks.
"What seems different is that there is an opportunistic mood to experiment with these things now," he said.