Josh Kahn, Senior Vice President, Global Solutions Marketing, EMC Corporation

EMC corp. might be under pressure to break itself up into bits and pieces, but that hasn’t stopped it from pushing ahead with its federation strategy. Today, it’s just launched its Federation Software-Defined Data Center Solution, the first of five radically new ‘federation solutions’ it hopes will reinvent enterprise IT.

The Federation SDDC draws upon technologies from all four federation members – EMC, VMware Inc., RSA Security LLC, and Pivotal Labs – to provide an integrated, enterprise-ready data center solution across compute, storage and network. EMC says it’s designed to streamline and simplify data center operations by extending virtualization to the server, storage and networking, making them as easy and inexpensive to manage as regular virtual machines.

Key to all of this is server virtualization, which abstracts and pools compute resources to make everything run more efficiently while delivering higher utilization. Similarly, storage is transformed into a simple, accesible platform by automating management and delivery across various file, block, object, HDFS and commodity storage types. Finally, these capabilities are combined with network virtualization, allowing physical networking services like firewalling, load balancing, routing and switching to be redefined to deliver greater control and efficiency.

EMC highlights the speed and agility of the Federation SDDC.’s as its main benefits. End users can access a self-service portal to request standardized services on demand, rather than creating an IT ticket and waiting. It also reduces provisioning times through the use of templates and full automation.

“The new Federation Software-Defined Data Center Solution provides a new architecture that simplifies IT design to put unprecedented agility, speed, security and control in the hands of our customers enabling then to radically redefine their IT,” said Josh Kahn, Senior Vice President, Global Solutions Marketing, EMC Corporation.

In turn, this should lead to substantial cost savings, especially for those enterprises that are still tied to their old legacy IT environments.

“It will help enterprise IT accelerate the strategic imperative of migration to a hybrid cloud while utilizing their existing investments,” said David Floyer, Co-Founder and CTO, Wikibon. “This will allow for improved costs, availability and flexibility to ensure enterprise IT can compete directly with cloud providers where it makes business and technical sense to deploy in-house, and at the same time enable seamless access to next-generation cloud applications, infrastructure and data resources.”

To sweeten the deal, EMC is also offering what it describes as a “collaborative support model” for users of the Federation SDDC. Customers will be able to initiate a support call with any one of the four federation members, who will then take responsibility for coordinating with other members to remedy any problems.

The Federation SDDC is available now, and will soon be joined by further EMC Federation solutions, including a new Platform-as-a-Service offering, an End-User Computing solution, a Virtualized Data Lake and new Security Analytics solution, in the coming months.