EMC World: Steps To A Private Cloud

The unifying theme at the recent EMC World 2010 conference in Boston was that the journey to the private cloud starts now. While that vision permeated company executives' keynote presentations, do not make the mistake that EMC has its head in the clouds. Large vendors need to take a leadership role so that customers believe that they will be able to meet their evolving requirements. Those vendors also have to have a clear understanding of what customer requirements are today, a point to which EMC has always paid close attention.

Among the number of senior executive keynotes, three that most articulated the vision of the private cloud were Joe Tucci, chairman, EMC president and CEO; Pat Gelsinger, president and COO, EMC Information Infrastructure Products; Howard Elias, president and COO, EMC Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services. In addition to their customer-facing keynote public presentations, these three expanded on the direction that EMC is taking in individual question-and-answer sessions with industry analysts who attended EMC World.

In effect, the private cloud is the process by which IT infrastructures will be transformed into what some have called "next generation data centers." While EMC's vision of the private cloud is actually a hybrid that includes internal clouds owned by enterprise clients and external clouds managed by service providers, the focus at EMC World tended to be on the process whereby an internal data center is transformed into a private cloud.

This approach seemed reasonable in order to get customers to embrace change as a positive rather than a threat, which some might perceive the external cloud to be. The private cloud promises many things, including greater cost efficiencies -- which includes freeing up part of the 70 percent of the data center's costs expended on maintenance to more productive uses, such as innovation that can help drive competitive advantage through the use of information technology -- and overall operational flexibility, which includes on-demand provisioning and application-data mobility over distance.

Before he discussed the cloud, Joe Tucci emphasized that EMC is at its heart and soul a technology company. In the last five years, EMC spent about $14 billion on new technical capabilities. About half that money was spent in the form of internal research and development and about half on acquisitions of external companies and intellectual property. EMC plans to continue acquiring companies this year. Tucci then turned his attention to the private cloud, which he feels is necessary to deal with the complexity, inefficiency, inflexibility and cost of current IT infrastructures. And those problems are only exacerbated by the information explosion as documented by EMC-sponsored IDC research.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.Tidbits
One of the interesting things about large vendors is that they have the resources to address matters that are not directly and solely part of the supply and value chain processes that of necessity occupy most or even the entire attention of smaller companies. As an example, EMC has embedded in its corporate DNA a fanatical attention to the needs of its customers, which it measures via customer satisfaction surveys and customer councils. More recently, EMC has added a customer loyalty initiative that measures the likelihood of retaining existing customers or acquiring new clients from competitors, and the company plans to strengthen that effort. Customers should wish that each of their vendors had such a robust program to proactively monitor and address issues that matter most.

EMC also supports a corporate sustainability initiative that reinforces its practical commitments to social and environmental responsibility. Although EMC can take some internal actions, such as working to manage its use of energy in its facilities and products, a lot of its efforts here are collaborative. Working with other vendors, EMC can help bring about changes that meet, say, environmental or international working conditions goals. EMC and other similarly motivated vendors should be commended and encouraged in their efforts.

As a long-time participant in the information technology industry, customer meetings tend to bring my type of people (i.e. geeks) together for several days for learning (as well as other activities). Even the marketplace represented by the product solutions pavilion is a welcome and familiar sight (though I wasn't buying anything!). The reason that everything is so welcome is that it represents how technology is on the move, still growing, changing and adding value to the real world.

EMC World 2010 reinforced the idea that the positive effects of IT will continue through companies taking the first steps to the private cloud. What EMC is saying is that there is much more that IT can do and that the private cloud will enable progress that benefits IT, the enterprise as a whole, and society in general (as IT is a major economic driver). In EMC's case, knowing and clearly describing where the road ahead leads can help IT organizations think about where they are going, why they should want that particular future, and what they have to do to achieve that vision.  At the time that this story was published, David Hill of the Mesabi Group is doing business with EMC.