The Brave New World of EMC

At the recent EMC World conference in Orlando, Florida, attendance was down slightly because of the recession to which IT is, of course, by no means immune. Despite that, the conference was buzzing with over 7,000 people and a lot of positive energy. With innumerable breakout sessions, attendees could focus on learning about individual EMC products and services. In contrast, the keynote presentations took a broader perspective looking at key industry trends and highlighting the innovations and partnerships EMC is and will continue to deliver for customers today and in the future.

The first keynotes were given by Joe Tucci, Chairman, President & CEO, EMC Corporation and Paul Maritz, President and CEO, VMware, Inc. Tucci began his presentation by describing the strategic synergies of EMC's information infrastructure focus and VMware's virtualization infrastructure focus.

While EMC owns 85% of VMware, VMware operates as an independent company that depends deeply on its partner ecosystem. Among those partners are vendors with whom EMC competes in areas, such as storage and content management. But Tucci's remark points to how clearly EMC recognizes the benefits of co-opetition with regards to VMware and the independence of VMware is key to sustaining that co-opetition.

EMC benefits from the financial success of VMware and it has been able to leverage the company's server virtualization to boost storage sales. Tucci emphasized that VMware's vision and strategy is central to EMC's vision and strategy, and the company plans to continue to take advantage of that dynamic.

But the future is the future and EMC recognizes that it also has to deal with the here and now. Tucci noted that global GDP and global IT spending are down so the company is focusing on helping customers meet their "just-in-time" and "just enough" IT budgeting goals. EMC focuses on mapping to these customer priorities with programs that enable:

-- Storing more efficiently

-- Next generation backup and archive

-- Making protection effective and affordable

-- Securing critical assets

-- Virtualizing your information infrastructure

-- Automating data center operations

-- Leveraging content for competitive advantage

-- Accelerating business value for applications

On the storage side, EMC claims the number one market position in external disk (23%), networked storage (28%), and VMware environments (48%). Areas of growing interest include server virtualization's influence on storage, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), cloud-based storage, and data center efficiency. However, Tucci said that the #1 new storage technology -- Solid State Disk (SSD) tuned arrays -- will totally change the array-based storage game. Enterprise SSD prices versus Fibre Channel (FC) drives have fallen a dramatic 76% in 12 months. As a result, a Symmetrix DMX-4 55 TB array with a balanced mix of flash, FC, and SATA drives offers 60% more IOPS with 28% fewer drives and that would result in 21% less power and cooling at 17% lower cost versus a Symmetrix with only FC drives.

Tucci noted that EMC is focusing a great deal of attention and energy on the concept of the "private cloud." Private clouds are intended to bring together what customers like about internal data centers (trust, control, reliable, and secure) with what customers like about cloud computing (dynamic, efficient, on-demand, and flexible). EMC believes the first step to the private cloud is to virtualize your data centers -- in essence building your own internal cloud. Once virtualized, data centers will be able to federate out to external clouds services, but maintain the trust, control, reliability and security that is required for the enterprise.

Paul Maritz followed Tucci with a focus on how VMware's new vSphere solution is changing the virtualization game by bringing the cloud to the data center. It does this as part of a hardware and software ecosystem that can take advantage of partners in security, availability, management, computing, storage and networking.

The goal is to take full advantage of multi-core CPUs to create what Maritz called a "giant computer" or "software mainframe" that will have both high performance and high scalability characteristics. Physical resources can be dynamically and intelligently scheduled. The ability to have logical service definitions means that SLAs and policies travel wherever applications actually reside. Plug-in policy engines that hold the state of the application are a key part of this capability. Another vSphere capability is distributed power management, which enables the giant computer to be more power thrifty than it would otherwise be. All this plays into the federated private cloud.

Despite the fact that EMC has metamorphosed into an information infrastructure company, it still maintains a strong focus on its storage heritage. Frank Hauck, who recently replaced Dave Donatelli as Executive Vice President of the EMC Storage Division, and colleagues gave a keynote on storage strategies designed to make life simpler, faster and more productive.

Hauck claims that EMC has the newest mid-tier architecture (CLARiiON CX4), the newest unified storage architecture (Celerra NS), the newest high-end architecture for physical environments (Symmetrix DMX-4), and the only high-end architecture purpose-built for virtual data centers (Symmetrix V-Max). Lower costs (as well as lowered power requirements) will come about through tiering together all three types of drives. EMC's upcoming Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) will automate the placement and movement of data based on changing needs, replacing less efficient manual processes. FAST will be available Q4 2009 across all EMC platforms.

Hauck closed be saying that the company is also focusing on further simplifying the management of virtual environments with a number of technologies (including FAST) that will quickly provision resources on demand, enable non-disruptive mobility of information across all types of storage, deliver policy-based load balancing across resources, and provide centralized and automated management. All these capabilities are key to enable EMC's concept of the federated private cloud.

Art Coviello, President, RSA and a colleague presented an insider's view of the fraud underground. The information explosion has lead to device proliferation and mobile computing. Social networking is on the rise as is business-to-consumer electronic commerce. The unintended consequence of this information explosion is an increase in personal and business risk, leading to a need for a rapid transformation of the IT infrastructure. For example, the RSA security system does a number of things including providing a centralized policy management system, DLP (data loss prevention) classification and risk-based authentication that makes decisions based on risk or trust, and adaptive authentication that enforces controls transparently, which is triggered by risk.

In Coviello's view, such an approach is now necessary because fraud is being run as a service -- there is actually a fraud "supply chain." A harvesting fraudster manages the technical infrastructure (such as Trojans) to collect (i.e. steal) consumer or business information and a cash out fraudster runs an operational infrastructure to monetize fraudulently-obtained data.

According to Coviello, the industry is fighting back. RSA stopped more than $1.5 billion in fraud in 2008. The security industry as a whole shut down 120,000 Trojan and phishing sites. However, attacks are still continuing and targeted attacks on the enterprises, notably against laptop computers, are on the rise. Thus, so is the need for security solutions, such as the RSA Security System.

Mark Lewis, President, EMC Content Management and Archiving Division, spoke on driving ROI, where ROI means not only return on investment, but also return on information.

Given that the consequences of not effectively managing information can be severe, Lewis believes enterprises must change from an application centric to an information centric perspective on information management. Lewis noted that static placement of information must be replaced by dynamic, policy-driven management. Isolated ECM component platforms will have to yield to integrated platforms. Static "coded" applications will have to change to dynamic "composite" applications. Since the conventional consolidation of siloed applications has not been as successful as many hoped, federation is likely key to success.

In Lewis' view, a driving force behind the need for these changes is how we use and interact with information technology. Formerly, the vast majority of company employees worked in offices; now anyone can be anywhere. One UI (user interface) used to be enough for most companies; now they have to deal with virtually any UI. Team collaboration has extended to community collaboration and now to extended enterprise collaboration.

To ensure these realities Lewis believes there is a need to move from a physical to a virtual framework -- moving from where information is locked to an application to an architecture that enables information to be served up to composite applications as appropriate and shared with other applications as business needs require. The new Documentum Composition Platform enables the rapid creation of composite applications that Lewis said will deliver the necessary integration at half the operating cost and half the solution cost of traditional approaches, providing the ROI -- return on information -- businesses require.

EMC has not been immune to the affects of the economic downturn, but it has chosen to use this pause as an opportunity rather than as a crisis (in keeping with the Chinese ideogram that expresses both concepts and has been stated as "May you live in interesting times."). As such, its investment in research and development, as well as its emphasis on sales, has not wavered. EMC believes that the current economic situation is due to lack of confidence rather than a sign of structural weaknesses. That attitude should be applauded. If it spread throughout business world, it would help prevent a vicious negative feedback cycle that does nobody any good.

Summarizing what any broad-based vendor is doing runs the risk of not covering all the important elements. The critical point to remember regarding EMC is that the company is on a product and service offensive that it feels will not only help to sustain it through the current global financial crisis, but also position it for future growth when the inevitable turnaround occurs.

The pivot point for EMC's future is its concept of the private cloud. Many organizations are probably more concerned about the here and now rather than the future of cloud computing and the virtual data center. For those customers, EMC offers products and services that meet critical business needs, such as cutting costs now. However, the private cloud represents a vision for the future of IT.

The private cloud will have both its champions and its naysayers (and its implications will be heavily discussed), but for today two things are certain. The first is that EMC is putting its money (and that is no small thing) behind its vision to work on turning the future into reality. Even intermediate results (such as better management tools) will be to the benefit of customers. The second is that EMC has thrown down the gauntlet to its competitors, who now have a number of options. If they agree with EMC's notion of the private cloud, they have to figure out how to respond. If they feel that they have a better vision, they have to work to make it happen.

Of course, there will be overlaps -- everyone understands the need for better green computing. All in all, the technology marketplace should benefit from the dynamism and innovation that will occur due to EMC's efforts. The future could be a brave new IT world.