"EMC is going all out on the private Cloud...It is a journey well worth taking." That was the bold statement made by EMC CEO Joe Tucci on the opening day of the EMC World conference.
While probably still best known as a storage vendor, EMC has firmly bet the farm on Cloud Computing changing the entire nature of data centres in enterprises. “IT infrastructure has gotten too complex, too inefficient, too inflexible, and too costly,” Tucci said. “[People are] managing a lot more with the same or less resources. We need a new approach. Enter the Cloud. This is the new approach. We’re now going through what I believe is . . . going to be the biggest wave in the history of information technology."
He cited figures from research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) which said the amount of data being generated per year was only 0.8 zetabytes in 2001, but will reach 35.2 zetabytes by 2020. A zetabyte is about 1 trillion gigabyes.
Tucci threw the spotlight on on a new EMC platform called Vplex, which is intended to bring virtualisation features — such as the federation of assets located over widely-spaced physical distances — to the world of storage by creating a single large virtual datacentre within a private Cloud.
He emphasised that EMC would continue to work with partners, most notably Cisco. “There's very few applications where you need only storage. Most need storage and compute together," he commented. "My preference is to do it with our partners. I don't want to compete with our partners. I'd rather work with our service provider partners that have that capability. We have a pretty big keiretsu lined up to work with us. Rather than one company that delivers everything, we have lots of partners to help us build a private Cloud.
“We want to give people the opportunity to build the cloud using whatever hardware they want. Choice is very important in our approach,” he said, adding that he did not agree with the idea that there would be a small handful of massive public Cloud providers such as Amazon and Google. “There won’t be four, five or six giant Cloud providers,” he said. “At the end of the day, you’ll have tens of thousands of private Clouds and hundreds of public Clouds.”
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