EMC Expands Cloud Management Ambitions

In one fell swoop this week EMC transformed into a force to be reckoned with in the cloud management space with the launch of new hybrid cloud services and the acquisition of three separate companies.

The EMC acquisition list included The Cloudscaling Group, a provider of a cloud operating system that spans public and private clouds; Maginatics, a provider of global namespace services; and Spanning Cloud Apps, a provider of a backup and recovery service designed specifically for software-as-a-service applications.

The Cloudscaling Group will become part of the EMC Emerging Technologies Division, while both Magniatics and Spanning Cloud Apps will be part of the EMC Core Technologies Division. But true to EMC form, Spanning Cloud Apps CEO Jeff Erramouspe said EMC will continue to let Spanning Cloud Apps operate under its existing brand; however, it’s also likely that in time EMC will bundle the company’s services with other data protection offerings.

Meanwhile, EMC is also making it clear that its ambitions in the cloud management space know no bounds. The company has created an EMC Hybrid Cloud Solution that not only enables a private cloud to set up in 28 days; it provides for the federated management of heterogeneous clouds.

Daanish Ahmad, Manager of Cloud Solutions Marketing at EMC, said that while hybrid clouds based on the same virtual machine platform will always deliver higher qualities of service, it’s clear that IT organizations need to be able to manage external cloud resources running on, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Other public clouds supported by EMC include VMware (VMW) vCloud Air and Microsoft (MSFT) Azure.

Initially, the EMC Hybrid Cloud Solution will only be available on VMware private clouds. But in 2015 EMC plans to deliver implementations for Microsoft Hyper-V and OpenStack environments.

Ahmad said many IT organizations these days are too intimidated to even begin a private cloud so EMC has put in over 40,000 engineering hours coming up with ways to automate the process. The end goal, said Ahmad, is to enable the self-service provisioning of any number of highly automated private cloud services.

Naturally, Ahmad said the EMC Hybrid Cloud Solution will run best of the Vblock servers and VSPEX storage systems from EMC. In fact, EMC just took control of formerly joint venture with Cisco that makes Vblock servers.

For solution providers cloud sprawl is about to become both a major opportunity and concern. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that IT organizations will need to embrace multiple public cloud services that will all need to be integrated with an internal private cloud. At the same time, without relying on more advanced forms of IT automation, it’s clear the cost of integrating those services could be prohibitive given the scale of computing involved.

EMC is clearly trying to get in front of that issue in way that turns it into a profitable opportunity for both EMC and its channel partners.