Pat Gelsinger described three phases on the way to the private cloud. The first is the IT production phase, whose goal is to help lower costs, such as by improving storage consolidation (analogous to the server consolidation brought about by virtualization). The second phase is the business production phase where mission-critical applications are included. This requires a level of trust as enterprises cannot put their mission-critical applications at risk. Gelsinger explained why the chain of trust necessary for security will be even greater in the virtual environment than it is in the physical world. Basically, a virtual machine had greater visibility to everything needed for security in the cloud than does a physical machine, allowing a finer-grained mechanism for deeper levels of security. That leads to the final phase, which is IT-as-a-service. Now technically, IT is a service today, but this phase adds formality and disciplines in the form of a policy-driven infrastructure that uses a service catalog to define the services that IT can deliver.
Howard Elias led a distinguished panel of EMC experts on the smart voyage to the private cloud that will simplify operations over time. That panel discussed the elements of policy-driven controls, service catalogs, and the value of being freed from geographical limitations. Overall, individual productivity and job satisfaction should be increased as the focus of administration in private clouds will be more on innovation than on mundane, repetitive and reactive crisis management tasks.
Beat the Backup Blues
But the cloud wasn't all that was discussed. Data protection (a particular special interest of mine) was the theme of an informative "Beat the Backup Blues" keynote session hosted by Frank Slootman, president of EMC's Backup and Recovery Systems and former president of Data Domain. EMC has never been shy about expressing its view that tape is, at best, a necessary evil. While tape might be included as part of an EMC solution (provided in conjunction with a partner), the company has not emphasized tape in its portfolio in contrast to competitors IBM, HP and Oracle/Sun. While EMC did not go so far as declaring tape dead (as it recognizes that many customers can only move so quickly), it believes that with its Avamar and Data Domain dedupe products, it is in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the growing trend toward disk-based data protection.
Slootman stated that the reason that backup redesign is currently a hot topic in IT data protection circles is that dedupe changes everything operationally and cost wise. As overall tape sales continue to fall, and Avamar and Data Domain are growing extremely rapidly (100 percent year after year), it brings to mind a process known as "creative destruction," a term popularized by the late Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, where one product replaces another.
All in all, key drivers of this trend are greater robustness and operational flexibility. Two EMC customers -- Emerson and McKesson -- publicly substantiated the company's claims as they move to adopting a more disk-centric solution. As EMC recognizes that change takes time, it continues to enhance its NetWorker backup software with controlled replication, as well as its Disk Library products. EMC announced Data Domain Boost Software, which redistributes the work that Data Domain does to an earlier point in the data protection process.
