EMC + the 6 Pathways to the Cloud
The cloud is where compute and storage are going. The long-term benefits of cost savings, flexibility and power will win that argument every time. However, businesses are slow to change. Adding even more confusion to the puzzle is that moving your data, compute and storage to the cloud is a whole lot more complicated than flipping a switch. Slowing down the messaging isn’t always a bad thing though…
Pacific Crest Securities recently published the results of a survey of chief information officers (CIO) as regards cloud computing. The study found that CIO’s are finding the “path to the cloud” is more complicated than just signing up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) or upgrading shares of EMC to Outperform from Neutral. Pacific Crest calls the revolution in cloud computing we’re experiencing “click to compute” and that there are ‘six pathways to the cloud’ including but not limited to SaaS and AWS: there’s also virtualization and automation, OpenStack, converged systems and services.
But EMC, as big as it is, hasn’t fallen prey to disruptive offerings from smaller, more nimble providers. The traditional storage vendor has taken steps to diversify its portfolio and keep up with new technology. When it comes to these six pathways to the cloud in particular, EMC has done a great deal in recent months to advance its efforts. Here is a collection of those recent advancements, broken down by “pathway”:
EMC: Virtualization and Automation
EMC’s ViPR Group is a virtualization and automation layer that can sit on top of any platform. Other solutions simply offer automation stacks, where ViPR provides a storage platform that plugs into all of these stacks. Win for cloud. Win for EMC.
EMC + CSC offer joint approach, or co-innovation to the “as a service” implementations to the cloud. It is clear that partnerships is going to be a way that EMC scales its cloud storage business.
SAP and EMC are quick to give specifics on how SAP environments improve business agility, which fundamentally reduces the cost of infrastructure. Storage visualization can be broken down to, and rightfully so, time and financial savings. There are practical savings opportunities offered by EMC’s VMware.
EMC’s strategy is to capitalize on the confluence of traditional enterprise data, cloud computing and big data growth. To that end, EMC’s strategy is to identify like-minded enterprise cloud providers and enable the development of so-called hybrid clouds – a combination of virtualized, on-premise data center infrastructure and outsourced services.
EMC announced VFCache, ‘Project Lightning’ in February. The first big vendor to acknowledge flash is going to be a major player in software-led storage, EMC has skin in the game. In conjunction with the announcement, EMC’s VMWare trimmed down its strategy and is doubling-down on solutions that virtualize, pool, and automate the data center.
EMC: OpenStack
In December of last year, EMC announced their support of OpenStack and became a corporate sponsor. EMC’s top priority today is the virtualization stacks. EMC, as its tradition, is playing the field. They’re going to have multiple options, fill out a broad portfolio and engage customers and make sure they’re not going to lose any strategic positions to its competitors.
EMC indicated that ViPR contains three key components, including the ViPR software-defined storage platform that gives partners control over the management of their storage infrastructure (control plane) and the data that resides within it (data plane). ViPR Object Data Services is able to integrate with OpenStack via Swift, allowing it to be run against any enterprise or commodity storage.
EMC invests big in Big Data and OpenStack. Software-defined storage strategies from EMC and the field put us at an inflection point of technology.
EMC: Converged Systems
IDC estimates that the converged infrastructure (‘hardware that is created with virtualization in mind’) market will grow from $2.0 billion in 2011 to $17.8 billion in 2016. VCE, a converged infrastructure three-way partnership between VMware, Cisco and EMC proves the importance and demand for converged products in order to achieve efficiency in the data center.
Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman shares how enterprise IT can learn from the architectural models of hyperscale companies and how converged infrastructure solutions meet the market’s requirements. It is a great outline for all converged infrastructure solutions, including EMC’s.
VCE, the converged infrastructure vendor sells Vblocks, end-to-end systems that feature solutions from its parent companies: EMC storage, Cisco servers and switches, and VMware’s hypervisor.
EMC believes that deployments of flash at different levels of the stack will exponentially increase in the near future. EMC is currently focusing on driving latency to its lowest possible levels.
EMC: Services
EMC to consolidated and virtualized SAP within the organization. An overarching goal of EMC is to create self-serve “services” at scale through virtualization. The goal aims for a clear reduction in complexity, eliminating unnecessary interaction between the applications, and speeding things up. Simplifying the environment.
EMC has brought virtualization to the data center, thus software optimization’s infamous virtualization tax is so negligible that the advantages far outweigh the cost. Native APIs included in the hypervisor go all the way down to the networking layer and enable advanced business continuity and parallel work stream functionality.
Big Data has reached the heart of enterprise IT, and enterprise IT itself has become a big data problem. In this exact environment the solution proposed by EMC and Isilon thrives. EMC has incorporated flash into their products for the past few years, and now but they want now to automate more — a la ViPR.
A global strategic partnership between Lenovo and EMC Corporations includes an x86 server technology development program and an OEM and reseller realtionship for all of EMC’s storage solutions. LenovoEMC aims to deliver quality and ease-of-use that make its network storage products the best of breed for all customers.
Partnerships continue to pay off for EMC both short and long-term. Platforms need maximum flexibility so Accenture Services built that on virtualization and standardization, so that the staff can work with homogeneous blocks of infrastructure that all look and function in very similar ways. A close partnership with EMC is a key part of that strategy.
EMC’s VMware is offering the IP and resources to the VMware ecosystem of partners and integrators. If VMware can pull this “channel model” off then they can blow past Openstack and really compete with Amazon Web Services progress in the enterprise.
Since 2010 EMC has transformed from a storage vendor to an IT-as-a-service provider. Minimizing the hassle associated with enterprise-scale Big Data deployments in regards to virtualization, consolidation and storage tiering is key for EMC’s plans.
EMC’s growth strategy revolves around product range, function, geographies and cloud. Speaking of the adoption of cloud, there is a TAM shift occurring from data centers to service providers, mainly for small to medium businesses. Larger enterprises entail a lot more complexity, a lot more scale, and this is where EMC’s ViPR is essential.
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