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.