Last week at EMC World, we announced a lot of new technologies and talked a lot about our federated business model, which includes VMware and Pivotal. So let me piece it all together briefly for the benefit of people who want to better understand EMC’s overall storage strategy and how that strategy fits into what the rest of the EMC federation is doing.
We remain committed to our best-of-breed strategy in primary arrays and data protection. We don’t believe that a one size solution fits all workloads or use cases. We believe in the right tool for the right job. In certain use cases, we believe flash will have a profound impact on storage infrastructure – whether it be in hybrid arrays, all flash arrays or server-side flash. These flash deployments will form the ‘hot edge’ of storage infrastructure. But according to IDC, through 2017, 97 percent of all storage deployments will still be hard drive based. So it’s clear there is a need for a capacity tier, or ‘cold core’ as we call it. At cloud scale, that’s commodity hardware – purely for economic reasons.
Then, so that we’re not creating a new island of storage for applications that are going to be deployed against commodity drives, we created ViPR. Through this software-defined storage layer, we can manage the new applications, the cloud scale apps that run against commodity drives in very much the same way that we can manage the existing primary storage estate. And within there, we’ll also provide data services which run against the commodity hardware, object storage, HDFS storage, file and block.
That is fundamentally the storage architecture that is going to plug into VMware’s software-defined data center, which is going to form the basis of the private cloud, and also form the basis of many public clouds as well. VMware Hybrid Cloud Service (vCHS) is a federation asset jointly operated by VMware and EMC, and if you are a VMware and EMC customer, it’s the best way to take advantage of the public cloud, with the kind of service level guarantees and security guarantees that you don’t get from a public cloud.
And then from an application standpoint, Pivotal, which is very adept at building next generation applications, will accelerate and ease application deployment in private and public clouds using Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service offering.
Then from a security standpoint, security no will longer just be about the security of individual devices in the data path but about the security of all of the data in the organization. Security analytics is where we believe most organizations are headed. To use an analogy, it’s no longer enough to simply put locks on doors. In addition to locks, what’s needed are surveillance cameras to monitor all the traffic across the network as well as the information flow within the organization, to determine what is normal behavior and then detect abnormalities and the presence of an intruder.
That’s our product strategy in a nutshell, and every element is part of a broader strategy that maps to what our customers are trying to do in their business.
