EMC Unveils Hybrid Cloud Solution, Backed By Trio Of Acquisitions

EMC Tuesday unveiled a hybrid cloud solution and related services as well as the acquisition of three small cloud technology providers which together are aimed at advancing its ability to help customers build hybrid clouds.

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution is focused on helping business users quickly deploy IT-as-a-Service infrastructures based on EMC engineered systems featuring pre-integrated VCE Vblock solutions or VSPEX reference architectures, said Bharat Badrinath, EMC's senior director of global solutions marketing.

EMC's acquisitions -- OpenStack IaaS solution developer Cloudscaling, which was revealed earlier this month; global namespace provider Maginatics; and cloud-based application data backup and recovery provider Spanning -- are targeted at letting EMC extend its hybrid cloud capabilities across cloud infrastructure, storage and data protection, the company said.

[Related: EMC Reorgs, Forms New Cloud Business Unit]

Together, the news ties together a number of recent moves by the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company to advance its hybrid cloud capabilities.

EMC earlier this month unveiled the first of five planned integrated solutions based on technology sourced from multiple parts of the EMC Federation. That initial solution, the Federation Software-Defined Data Center, combines EMC and VMware technology into a flexible platform upon which further EMC Federation technologies can be built, Badrinath said at the time.

The EMC Federation includes EMC Information Infrastructure; virtualization leader VMware; big data and custom app developer Pivotal; and security technology developer RSA.

October also saw EMC move to absorb VCE, its joint venture with Cisco Systems to develop pre-integrated Vblock converged infrastructure solutions, into EMC by purchasing much of Cisco's equity in VCE. That move will make VCE a part of the EMC Federation.

In addition, EMC this month reorganized its existing product lines into two new divisions, the Emerging Technology Division and the Core Technology Division, and formed a new business unit focused on its cloud management and orchestration product line.

The new EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution will come in three editions, Badrinath said.

The first, the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition with VMware, is based on the company's Federation Software-Defined Data Center, with the addition of new acceleration services and new services partners that can help with the deployment, Badrinath said. It is available immediately.

EMC plans to offer similar solutions based on the Microsoft Cloud Platform and OpenStack in 2015, he said.

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution can be deployed in as few as four weeks, Badrinath said. "The implementation takes only one week, once customers get the hardware and software parts," he said. "Design takes three to five weeks."

Customers can work with EMC Global Services or with one of several EMC services partners to deploy the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution, Badrinath said.

"We are working with channel partners to help them with the services," he said. "We are working on getting them up to speed with the right specialties for next year."

NEXT: EMC's New Services, Three New Cloud Acquisitions

This includes IT Transformation Workshop, Cloud Advisory, and Enterprise Hybrid Cloud design and implementation services, which are slated to become part of EMC's Business Partner Program in the first quarter of 2015, he said.

Solution providers also can resell services from EMC Global Services, he said.

The architecture of the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution includes self-service templates for Bronze, Silver and Gold support tiers, said Subbu Iyer, EMC's senior vice president of global product marketing.

It also includes automated workflows for finding the right software and hardware for setting up the tiers, Iyer said.

"The solution automates the choices," he said. "Customers can specify a database with five-nines of service. The solution automatically finds the right components to match the required availability."

The solutions will be available in three sizes, Badrinath said, including one for up to 500 virtual machines, one for up to 5,000 virtual machines and one for up to 10,000 virtual machines.

"Irrespective of the size, the implementation time will still be about one week," he said.

The solutions are modular, enabling customers to add such components as automated backup or disaster recovery, automatic continuous availability, dynamic network provisioning, self-service applications and more, he said.

EMC's acquisitions of the three small cloud technology developers advance EMC's embrace of OpenStack for developing hybrid cloud solutions.

EMC earlier this month said it will acquire San Francisco-based Cloudscaling, a cloud computing startup that develops technology which allows the building of OpenStack-based private clouds on customers' own choice of hardware.

EMC Tuesday said it expects Cloudscaling to help give customers multiple new options for running private and hybrid clouds while helping EMC accelerate its OpenStack-powered infrastructure offerings.

The acquisition of Mountain View, Calif.-based Maginatics gives EMC a consistent global namespace accessible from any device or location. EMC said Maginatics will address cloud data protection requirements with a unified data protection and management solution across private, public and hybrid clouds.

Maginatics also provides data deduplication, WAN optimization, multithreading, and the ability to handle large objects to provide data mobility across multiple clouds. EMC plans to integrate Maginatics technology with its current data protection software, storage and services, the company said.

Austin, Texas-based Spanning provides subscription-based backup and recovery for ’born-in-the-cloud’ applications and data, including data from applications such as Google Apps and Salesforce.com, with similar capabilities planned for Microsoft Office 365 in the near future.

Cloudscaling is slated to become a part of the new EMC Emerging Technologies Division, while Maginatics and Spanning are slated to be part of the new EMC Core Technologies Division.

PUBLISHED OCT. 28, 2014