EMC Cloud Computing: Virtual Computing Environment (VCE), Vblock, and Atmos

EMC Atmos and Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) and VBlock [IaaS]

Basically we are removing risk.
This is all about efficiency, control and choice.
--EMC chief executive Joe Tucci on partnership with Cisco

EMC’s primary focus is on helping customers safely build out their next-generation, fully virtualized data centers and lead them along the journey to private cloud computing, which offers the promise of a dramatically more efficient and effective model for delivering IT as a service.
--EMC chief executive Joe Tucci

EMC offers public, hybrid, and private cloud solutions.

In the private cloud space, EMC is challenging IBM and HP with a new private cloud offering called Virtual Computing Environment (VCE), consisting of EMC's VMware, Cisco networking, and EMC Atmos cloud storage. It is an approach to the internal data center which improves utilization, power consumption, and security of information with a network-based architectural approach for optimizing virtual resources.

According to EMC and Cisco, an initial customer trial of VCE's basic building pieces called Vblock Infrastructure Packages resulted in a 40% cost reduction for operating and managing virtualized data center infrastructure. VCE is tailored to appeal to customers with 300 to 6,000 virtual machines.

Information Week notes: "In addition, other major IT players are participating in the rollout of VCE including Intel (NSDQ: INTC) -- another early investor in VMware -- whose Xeon processors and other Intel data center technology are involved. Intel is a major player in a new joint venture with Cisco, EMC, and VMware called Acadia, in delivering the Vblock architecture to customers. Acadia, designed to quickly transfer Vblock infrastructure to organizations eager to accelerate moves to virtualization and the private cloud, is expected to begin serving customers in early 2010."

EMC Global Marketing CTO Chuck Harris on VBlock: ...we were taking this approach to support a lower cost delivery model for ourselves for Acadia... We needed to be able to provide a price competitive managed service in a highly competitive market – so we built Vblock for ourselves.

GigaOM's Stacy Higginbotham provides some excellent commentary. She notes, "Another big issue here is the openness of the platform. None of these players are known for their embrace of open software, and most are far more famous for squeezing high margins out of proprietary code. IBM and Rackspace have been pushing for some type of open cloud effort, which it defines as being built through a standards group. Vblocks are a refutation of that model, and of the idea that commodity hardware will underlie most clouds."

In the hybrid cloud space, EMC is working with partners who provide front-end solutions which leverage an enterprise gateway for a fast block layer to a REST backend for storage with EMC Networker and compute on the Atmos cloud. Also, Sharepoint provider integration is one of their sweet spots, allowing clients to have parallel object storage alongside their conventional database storage.

In the public cloud space, EMC offers Atmos Storage Cloud and Atmos Compute Cloud, both in beta as of Q4, 2009. Atmos Storage Cloud is an object store with a web service (WSDL) interface, so is optimal for long-tail page, data, and object storage. Customers include AT&T which uses EMC as the back end for its Synaptic Storage offering and a very large e-Commerce company which serves 140 million listings, a scale which breaks conventional web architecture.

Financially, EMC has $25 billion in cash and is growing through acquisitions. Their stability is a big competitive advantage.

As of Q4, 2009, EMC is pursuing ISO certifications.