EMC sees a bright future in virtualisation and Cloud Computing, according to CEO Joe Tucci at the recent EMC World conference in Orlando.
EMC wants to position itself as a vendor that provides the virtualisation tools to help make data centres start to act like Clouds. "What we're really doing is making your data centre more Cloud-like, an internal Cloud," said Tucci. "And we're attaching them to an external Cloud using VMware, making them federated.
"In the future, you're going to say, 'My data centre is my internal Cloud, but I'm also going to pick two or three service providers for my external Cloud, and I'm going to drop part of my internal Cloud into my external Cloud. And that's the advantage of working with EMC and VMware."
Virtualisation is already running a lot of the biggest applications for many of the world's largest companies, noted Chuck Hollis, EMC's chief technology officer, citing the US top carmakers and the oil and gas industries as examples. "Virtualisation is now ready to run the biggest applications," he said. "It's ready for the biggest applications today.... We put big, hairy Oracle and Exchange workloads on VMware. We work with outsourcers that are now completely virtualised."
Atmos unveiled
EMC also unveiled a web-delivered version of its Atmos Cloud storage service to offer Cloud-optimised storage' aimed at large businesses that need to manage information on a global scale while giving staff worldwide access to content.
Atmos onLine provides what EMC is calling Cloud Optimized Storage (COS) capabilities that can scale effectively, coupled with security and management tools. While you don't need Atmos to use Atmos onLine, EMC is offering federation to allow clients to set policies that determine the automatic federation of information between a company's private Cloud and on-premises data centre based on its sensitivity. For example, a customer can set policies to federate their information to an external Atmos storage Cloud for cost efficiencies and collaboration. Atmos runs on industry standard x86 servers and has a storage capacity of up to 360TB, but EMC has argued that the storage capability is at a petabyte, rather than terabyte, scale.
"Some people think that Cloud and internet go together, but this is not accurate," said Mike Feinberg, EMC Cloud Infrastructure Group senior vice president. "Cloud is an architecture and is on-demand, but a large number of customers are now interested in getting internet access. We've got to embrace a hybrid model. You don't have to have Atmos in the data centre. But we're trying to enable enterprise IT shops to have the flexibility to manage data over the Internet and behind the firewall in the same way."
EMC's claims were endorsed by AT&T which unveiled a new service dubbed AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service (SaaS). This is a storage-on-demand offering that gives enterprises the ability to control the storage, distribution and retrieval of data from anywhere over the Web. It is built on the AT&T network Cloud, one that carries more than 17 PB a day and encompasses 38 data centers in 12 countries across four continents, and EMC Atmos Platform.
"We have the world's largest Cloud," said Steve Caniano, vice president of Web hosting for AT&T's Business Services division. "A corporate network can connect to the Cloud using a virtual private service which provides plenty of security. We are calling it a virtual private storage Cloud. Services such as this are bringing more credibility to the Cloud within the enterprise.”
VMware's Google caution
Meanwhile VMware itself unveiled vSphere, which it describes as an operating system for building private Clouds. CEO Paul Maritz warned delegates not to be misled by how easy Google finds it to launch Clouds. "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. We are now in the business of stitching together software that allows you to aggregate computer resources more efficiently.
"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."
Overall the EMC message is clear. "It is the mission of EMC and VMware to make the Cloud become just as secure as an internal data center, whether it is an internal Cloud or an external one," said Tucci.
Post new Comment