Cloud is the next big wave, believes EMC

BANGALORE, INDIA: In the past, the industry witnessed different waves like mainframe era, mini-computers, desktop computing and the distributed environment. And what is the next wave?

“We believe the next big wave is 'cloud',” says Sarv Saravanan, vice president and MD, EMC Data Storage Systems India Pvt Ltd.

He was talking about EMC's new-found passion — ‘private cloud’. “The IT infrastructure, mainly data centers, is getting too complex, inefficient and costly. Enterprises need to think towards private cloud,” he adds.

Also read: Cloud's future is not cloudy

Further, Saravanan explains the new concept, what he calls as 'Cloud Paradigm'. For example, a service provider can look at converting his internal data center into private cloud, and also look at public cloud for external customers. They will be able to work together to serve both existing business logic and future applications. Eventually, there will be thousands of private clouds and hundreds of public clouds in existence.

For any enterprise, reliability, security and scalability are the main concern areas. Moving to private cloud would provide on-demand storage, which is safe and secure, and could be scalable to any extent as in a traditional data center, adds Saravanan.

Also read: We are buoyant about Iomega, says EMC

Further, he says that this is not going to happen in one day.

“It is a journey. We have three phase to it — the first phase in the journey to the private cloud starts with the pooling of IT resources, meaning they are virtualized and abstracted into logical units such as storage, networking and server. This leads to reduction in capital costs through server consolidation and increased utilization of resources across the IT infrastructure. At this phase non-mission-critical applications are virtualized, he says.

The second phase looks at opportunities to define service-levels for all applications running in the virtualized infrastructure. In this phase, all mission-critical applications are pooled and virtualization management solutions are deployed, enabling the virtualization of Tier-1 enterprise applications.

The third phase brings the full benefit of the private cloud to the business. It offers opportunities to stream desktops as a managed service from the private cloud.

Before we offer this concept to the enterprises globally, EMC tested its own concept of private cloud as early as 2004. This has resulted in huge savings for the company, says Saravanan.

Also read: EMC brings Data Domain's inline dedupe solution

What differentiates EMC with other cloud storage is its integration with VMware and Cisco. “Enterprises will leverage the collective strength of hardware, software and solutions of these three major. Along with this, our private cloud appliance Vplex. Vplex is designed to help enterprises bring multiple storage arrays into a single resource pool and to enable them to move petabytes of storage over long distances through a caching technique called distributed cache coherence,” he adds.

Although EMC is in the public cloud business with the Atmos Online storage cloud offering, it is clear that EMC currently places more emphasis on the private cloud build-ups. The message is clear, EMC wants to be in the 'cloud era', not as a storage vendor but as a major solution provider along with its partners.