Continuing the “third platform for IT” theme at its annual customer conference this week, EMC has unloaded another batch of product updates on Tuesday, with the focus this time around being hybrid cloud computing.

As a reminder, the first day of EMC World 2014 saw the announcement of several new and updated solutions, including a scale-out storage module that packs up to 2.9 petabytes of capacity in a single rack and a new version of ViPR featuring support for commodity arrays and expanded management capabilities for geographically distributed environments. Additionally, EMC revealed that it had acquired a stealthy flash startup called DSSD, the brainchild of ZFS creators Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore.  The vendor didn’t disclose the terms of the deal or what it is exactly the two storage industry veterans have been working on, but Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante speculates that the buyout is meant to allow it to better compete against the likes of Fusion-io.

“Where Fusion-io is playing is in that server-side-flash-that’s-a-memory-extension [market], and that to me is a game-changing capability from an application development standpoint,” Vellante remarks during the Day 1 Wrap-Up segment on theCUBE. “When you start to talk about  flash as a memory extension, not only eliminating spinning disk but eliminating all the overhead associated with the storage protocol, that’s two to three time orders of magnitude greater performance – I think that’s what the acquisition is about.”

The second day of the conference is turning out to be just as exciting.

Blueprint for the hybrid cloud

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Among the new offerings that made their debut this morning, the most notable is the EMC Hybrid Cloud Solution, an end-to-end reference design pegged as a blueprint for the software-defined data center. It unifies the vendor’s entire portfolio as well as that of its subsidiaries in a single programmable package that reaches much farther up the stack to deliver a higher value proposition.

The platform can be set up in as little as under 48 hours and allows administrators to provision infrastructure and services across both on- and off-premise environments  with a just few clicks of the mouse, EMC product marketing head Josh Kahn wrote in a recent blog. He also detailed that the architecture makes it possible for users to consume software on a self-service basis through a so-called “marketplace of application resources.”

At launch, Hybrid Cloud Solution will only be compatible with VMware environments, but EMC said that it intends to add support for OpenStack and Hyper-V further down the line. Beyond the virtualization layer, it includes ViPR, plugs into the storage vendor’s enterprise systems and data protection lineup, and extends to the public cloud through integration with the vCenter Hybrid Service and the Pivotal CF platform-as-a-service family.

Expanded vertical focus

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In conjunction with the introduction of the new reference design, EMC pulled the curtains back on the first industry-specific solution for CF. Developed by the company’s Information Intelligence group, the Supplier Exchange is essentially a hosted version of its Documentum collaboration platform that has been tailored to meet the specific requirements of customers in the energy engineering sector.

The portal, which natively integrates with existing on-premise Documentum deployments, gives key people in the value chain a comprehensive view of their assets, project status and other metrics pertaining to the contract deliverables.

The service represents a step in the right direction for Pivotal and the EMC federation as a whole. With price and scale out of the equation, delivering a portfolio of vertical solutions under a consistent hybrid model is the only way it can set itself apart from Amazon in the public cloud arena.

Supplier Exchange is joined by two significant enhancements to the vendor’s Syncplicty enterprise file sharing service: a SharePoint connector and the addition of StorageVault Authentication, an extra layer of protection managed internally that end-users need to go through when accessing a file for the first time.

Keeping both feet on the ground

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Back in the data center, EMC this morning launched InfoArchive, a unified platform for safeguarding large amounts of structured data, unstructured content, print streams  and any other type of information an enterprise might need  to hold onto for compliance purposes.

InfoArchive has a couple of interesting features. First, it allows users to schedule periodical archiving operations for specific processes, a capability that the company says reduces storage requirements and costs while improving application performance. And second, the solution makes it easier to decommission legacy apps by extracting data into an automated environment in which it’s managed in accordance with regulatory  requirements.