EMC Corp. has released 30 new services and solutions to help enterprises in their transition to private cloud environments.
The new portfolio aims to accelerate virtualization projects by providing expertise on the strategy, design, deployment and management of virtualized information infrastructures. The services and solutions also address issues with virtualized application infrastructures and governance.
“As part of building out that virtual infrastructure, we have strong reference architectures and methodologies around building security into that infrastructure,” said Nina Hargus, vice-president of Global Service Marketing for EMC.
The services and solutions address all stages of private cloud development, from enterprises just starting to take their first steps to those already involved in more mature levels. “We want to intersect them wherever they are,” said Hargus.
“What we’ve seen out there is customers who are very interested in starting down the path of virtualization. They are interested in where they can benefit from the private cloud and they see huge benefits in terms of utilization and efficiency and agility, but most of them need some help,” she said.
According to an July survey by Evans Data Corp., 30 per cent of 500 developers surveyed are currently developing applications for a private cloud. And while another 29 per cent plan to do so in the next two years, 40 per cent have no private cloud plans at all.
Many customers have already virtualized a small part of their environment and aren’t sure how to move ahead because they started without a plan, said Hargus. Customers see the benefits and get excited – they begin by fooling around with VMware and virtualizing a couple apps – but their efforts will often stagnate rather than scale easily across the data centre, she said.
“You have issues because the infrastructure is probably not prepared for that, you probably don’t have the management tools in place to handle it, you aren’t sure how to migrate Tier 1 apps. You kind of get stuck,” she said.
Those at more advanced stages who are ready to deploy technology can turn to EMC's Proven Solutions, which intend to minimize the risks. “These are highly tested, very specific environments where we can provide customers all kinds of reference architectures to help them design and lay out their environment with very predictable outcomes,” said Hargus.
According to EMC, Proven Solutions “enable customers to reduce virtual infrastructure configuration time by more than 65 per cent and deployment time by as much as 50 per cent; reduce e-mail archiving volumes for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 by more than 85 per cent; enable full-scale disaster recovery rehearsal without interruption to SAP production data; and reduce CPU cycles and improve resource efficiency for Oracle in virtual environments.”
The end stage is probably not one that is highly achievable today, according to Hargus. Data centre managers and executives use their resources for keeping things running, and little goes towards anything innovative, she said.
“If you think about today’s data centre, the best amount of resources in the data centre – people, dollars and technology – really go to keeping the current environment working,” said Hargus.
EMC's new Consulting Services include Data Center Virtualization Assessment, Data Center Virtualization Strategy, Data Center Virtualization Migration Planning and Management, and Security Virtualization Assessment.