EMC Advances Case for Hybrid Cloud Computing

EMC is slowly, but surely pulling together the elements of its federated ecosystem to create a hybrid cloud computing platform.

Under the auspices of The EMC Federation today at the VMworld 2015 conference previewed components that will be added to a Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud platform that combines elements of products and services from EMC and its VMware and Pivotal sister companies.

Berna Devrim, director of EMC cloud solutions marketing, said the goal is to make it a lot simpler to set up, deploy and manage hybrid cloud computing environments than it is today.

At the core of the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Platform will be new application lifecycle automation tools that will enable IT organizations to deploy applications on topo of both VMware vSphere and OpenStack environments as well as instances of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings based on the Virtustream platform that EMC acquired in May.

Also included under this initiative will be additional “pay-as-you-grow” deployment options based on the VCE vxRack Systems and configurations of those systems that support the EMC XtremIO all-flash array. In addition, EMC today revealed that SAP has joined the The EMC Federation partner program alongside EMC sister company VMware.

Finally, The EMC Federation is also announcing the first in a series of new Federation End-User Computing solutions that promises to make it simpler to deploy virtual desktops across a hybrid cloud. Scheduled to be available under “directed availability” in the third quarter, The Federation End User Computing offering can be deployed in the cloud or on premise.

The storage systems for this environment will be optimized in a way that puts virtual desktop images on EMC XtremIO all-Flash arrays and end-user data to reside on EMC VNX and EMC Isilon storage. The solution includes VMware’s Horizon Enterprise Suite along with a self-service catalog, IT automation and user experience monitoring tools.

First launched earlier this year at the EMC World 2015 conference, the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Platform is an effort to simplify one of the more complex undertakings that any solution provider and their customers are likely to undertake. In fact, that complexity is seriously hampering adoption of private clouds, which results in the number of workloads being pushed into the public cloud at rates that are orders of magnitude greater than private clouds. Of course, by definition a true hybrid cloud requires a private cloud running on premise or a hosting service to exist in some form of another. But once that private cloud exists, it’s usually a short period of time before that private cloud goes hybrid.