LAS VEGAS — Dozens of IT product and service providers now offer various ways for their customers to either build their own private or hybrid clouds or have one of them simply do all the heavy lifting themselves.
EMC joined the pack May 6 at the EMC World 2014 conference when it introduced its own EMC Hybrid Cloud package, which the company claims can deliver fast application provisioning/deployment to go with improved levels of IT automation.
The idea behind the Hybrid Cloud package is to build a bridge of sorts between easy-to-use but difficult-to-secure public cloud services and the speed/agility/security of purpose-built private clouds. Later, as a company grows or shrinks, the hybrid cloud system can be modified as needed to fill changing production requirements.
Using a hybrid cloud, enterprise IT staff can broker services from private and public clouds, enabling control over the best location from which to run business applications. The solution can also help profile applications and identify the most efficient, secure, and cost-effective IT operational model across both private and public clouds, EMC said.
EMC’s Hybrid Cloud uses a new end-to-end software-defined data center reference architecture that, naturally, is built upon EMC’s industry-leading private cloud solutions. However, in accordance with EMC’s overall policy allowing substitutions for many cloud pieces, users are not locked in to buying any of the components from EMC.
In its basic form, the hybrid package consists of EMC storage and data protection, Pivotal CF Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and the Pivotal Big Data Suite, VMware cloud management and virtualization solutions, and VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.
The Hybrid Cloud currently supports VMware environments and will soon support OpenStack and Microsoft environments, EMC said.
The Hybrid Cloud package also enables users to integrate their private clouds with multiple public clouds to create a unified hybrid cloud using compatible, on-demand services from EMC’s many sanctioned cloud service providers.
EMC’s Hybrid Cloud solution comes in three templates:
—Business User: A self-service portal that offers a personalized catalog of services and are charged only for what they use. This environment is housed in a secure data center that provides lower costs and better efficiency, and enterprise-class service levels.
—Cloud Developer: Developers will have on-demand access to the most modern and consistent development environments, and can use programing frameworks such as Java, Ruby, Node.js and Scala, as well as a wide variety of SQL and NoSQL database technologies.
—Hybrid Cloud IT Professional: IT professionals get best-of-breed technology composition, ease of deployment and more effective IT management, smarter health and performance monitoring, and 100 percent control over what their users can provision.