Welcome to EMC Consulting Blogs

As I am typing out of the EMC offices in Berlin, I can see in front of my eyes….the fantastic goal that Germany scored against Ghana last night. Wow, what a game

A second thought that comes into my mind is the tremendous wave of information that the football (soccer) World Cup has spawned throughout the globe. It is exactly this type of dynamic that Public Cloud environments were designed for. The ability to have an infrastructure that dynamically flexes from zero to a billion hits a second and probably more in every possible media format that one can imagine!

In many of the discussions I have with clients regarding cloud adoption, there is still the issue of clouds being new and that represents a fundamental risk to the operating environment of the firm. Clearly issues of security rank among the top concerns as well as the idea of multi-tenancy. Indeed, another question that we hear is why EMC for the Cloud? Well let me answer the various questions as I see them

Looking back on the environments that were designed for that massive amount of usage with an on-demand model in mind, there came into my mind the idea that there are other design patterns for Cloud that have been around in infant form for some time. The banks and credit card companies have the large scale universally accepted network in the form of ATMs, Merchants, Retailers, Card Issuers etc. This is probably one of the largest scale Private Clouds that comes into my mind.

On the Public Cloud side, the entire Internet itself could be viewed this way. TV networks themselves could be considered a Public Cloud of sorts, although some of the atypical properties associated with clouds could arguably be said to be missing.

Looking to hybrid clouds, the idea of the airline reservation systems being accessible through publicly available web interfaces is a prime example. Through this ‘Cloud’ the enormous resources in the actual data centers belonging to the various enterprises such as American Airlines, Lufthansa etc. are available although they are actually private resources held closely by those very firms.

This clearly indicates that Cloud adoption has worked in a fashion for all the above organizations on mind-boggling scales. There should not be any question that Cloud exists, and is evolving. There should equally for senior management be no doubt that Cloud must be on the corporate strategic agenda.

It is there, it is evolving, and those firms actively moving to adoption and usage are also the innovators of new business models sweeping away the debris of archaic 'IT infrastructure thoughts' in their respective industries.

They are very flexible, they are very fast, and by the time you realize they are at your doorstep it may well be too late to do anything about their business disrupting models. Consumers of all sorts are eager for these changes – they see tremendous savings to be made at the check-out counter and ultimately more money and value left in their own wallets/purses. That has got to be a good reason for adoption!

This does not exclude the obvious Cloud providers that come to mind, the Amazons, Googles, Microsofts and Terremark's of this world. They clearly have a very strong role to play in the areas of choice and fit-for-use for your organization. 

There was another example that came into my mind - a pre-cursor to the current cloud concepts that are penetrating corporate thinking due to the enormous potential value that could be extracted. The example that came to mind was EMC’s very own Centera platform!

The Centera product was originally from a small innovative firm called FilePool founded in the late 90s, based around the Brussels, Belgium (Mechelen) area in Europe, by Jan Van Riel and Paul Carpentier. EMC acquired FilePool for its ground-breaking Content Addressable Storage, CAS technology in April 2001.

The founders have been reunited in March 2008 in another company called Caringo and continue CAS technology innovation. I actually had the pleasure of visiting the Mechelen facilities after EMC acquired the firm. A great development spirit with some really forward looking thought leaders happily chatting about CAS and what they were going to do next – oh and did I mention there were so many Centera systems in one room

Centera is built around the ideas of simple storage and networking nodes pooled using a fantastic operating system called CentraStar. This system, built up in rack after rack, operates as one large unit, with open Centera APIs allowing access from a huge array of platforms and the web of course to be able to store data principally.

In the latest iteration with the release of the EMC Centera® Virtual Archive we start to see the Centera ability to manage Petabytes of information scaled to new heights, with policy driven archives being tightly managed to offer secure mass storage of fixed content. Looking at some of the features (I quote):

One can see the Cloud elements regarding multi-tenancy, federation, massive scalability and flexibility in configuration from very small to the largest federated archive platform for fixed content.

Clearly the modern interpretation of the Cloud is a more sophisticated construct simply through more sophisticated forms of information and consumption behavior that dwarfs that of the past. The challenges surrounding information management are similarly complex and multi-faceted. However, the Cloud paradigms of choice, efficiency and control through vastly simplified interfaces are designed to tackle ever increasing scale in a more information-efficient fashion.

EMC, never standing still, has taken the cloud storage ideas further through the Atmos offerings particularly in the policy based arena, pay-as-you-go consumption model and multi-tenancy capability. Infinite scale is also definitely nice to have.

So for senior management, the ideas surrounding the Cloud and its appropriateness for their business should not be a show stopper – there are well established design patterns out there. Clearly the ideas of the Cloud continue to evolve as industrious humans everywhere force evolution through use.

The challenges of managing the cloud are well established, as are many of the solution elements and frameworks to facilitate a smooth transition to the associated new infrastructure paradigms. The ecosystem surrounding Cloud offerings is also evolving, with many players working together to be able to drive value through the Cloud proposition.

EMC Consulting is leading the charge in getting management to understand and envision a future state for their organization using such constructs such that they remain competitively relevant. We are working hard with other industry leaders to help convey the capabilities inherent in the new paradigms and indeed using this to shape the products and solutions of the future.

EMC has a rich tradition of virtualization in various forms, cloud technologies built right into the core infrastructure products, and a portfolio of information management solutions that is second to none in the market. That's why EMC is so well placed to approach the Cloud from the information perspective to be able to ensure that there are solutions to actual problems both now, and those arising in the growing information universe of the future.

However, the current pallet of products, solutions and integrated offerings already offers the facility for organizations to rapidly step onto the Cloud and be instrumental in shaping future business models. They are powerful, scalable and cost effective right from day-1.