EMC reviews: Over 30 cloud services and solutions launched
K C Fung, director, technology solutions, EMC Hong Kong
EMC, a US-based storage infrastructure provider, embarked its cloud journey in 2007 with the acquisition of
Mozy, an online cloud storage service provider. Today, EMC offers solutions to help enterprises build private, public and hybrid cloud environments, and provides Security-as-a-Service through its security division
RSA.
In the past five years, EMC has acquired about 40 companies with roughly US$7 billion. K C Fung (picture), director, technology solutions, EMC Hong Kong, said, "We will continue to look for ways to add value to our portfolio of offerings and extend our product technology advantages. That said, we will continue to invest organically, form partnerships, and acquire where appropriate."
"EMC helped Liaoning Mobile build the industry's first virtualized data center in China, shortening the provisioning time from 1 month to 72 hours while lowering the TCO by 30 to 50%."
-- K C Fung, technology solutions director, EMC Hong Kong |
While EMC has been following a busy acquisition agenda, the company has funneled about 10% of its annual sales in research and development, including cloud computing technologies. In 2010, the company introduced more than 30 services and solutions in relation to virtualization, storage, security and information and content management.
EMC declined to provide the number of its active cloud customers in Asia, or the number of its data centers in the region. Regarding data center expansion plan in Asia, Fung said, "We [will] aggressively invest resources in Asia where we are seeing very strong potential."
Below is the excerpt of an interview between EMC's K C Fung and Asia Cloud Forum. It outlines EMC's major customer wins in 2010, target verticals of its marketing efforts for 2011 and how the company sees cloud computing will develop in Asia in the next three years.
Asia Cloud Forum: What were the three most important cloud services/ solution your company launched in 2010?
KC Fung: EMC has introduced more than 30 EMC services and solutions to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing, among which, the following three are important to highlight: 1) Vblock -- the first integrated infrastructure solution for building cloud infrastructure from EMC, Cisco, VMware; 2) Vplex -- the first virtual storage solution which enables storage federation across multiple data centers within the cloud; and 3) Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform -- the industry's first self-service cloud enablement platform for storage.
What were your company's biggest cloud solution deployments in Asia in 2010?
Fung: We have been working closely with a number of customers in the telecoms, FSI, logistics, government and education sectors in this region to help in setting up large-scale cloud infrastructure. There were a number of significant cloud deployments in Asia, including:
City of Dreams, a casino group under Macau-based Melco Crown Entertainmen
t, deployed EMC virtual infrastructure in 2009, offering a scalable and reliable platform for City of Dreams' most critical applications with 99.999% system availability, which helps assure uninterrupted service across the facility.
Liaoning Mobile, a subsidiary of
China Mobile, implemented VMware virtualization framework in May 2010. EMC helped Liaoning Mobile build the industry's first virtualized data center in China, shortening the provisioning time from one month to 72 hours while lowering the total cost of ownership by 30 to 50%.
SingTel implemented EMC's cloud technology to support the company to introduce enterprise cloud-based virtual data center services in Singapore in late 2010, which enable enterprise customers to operate their businesses more efficiently by ensuring IT resources are available when the business needs them.
Which industry vertical and country in Asia will your company target your marketing activities for cloud in 2011?
Fung: Our marketing activities in Hong Kong and the region will place strong emphasis on enterprises in various industry sectors such as FSI, logistics, government and education, which will be more aggressively virtualizing their data centers and moving to a private cloud infrastructure because they are seeing tremendous advantages in doing so (e.g. cost savings, green benefits, increased operational efficiency and productivity improvement, among others).
What have been your customers' three biggest concerns about cloud computing/ cloud services in 2010? How have you addressed their challenges?
Fung: Their three biggest concerns were: 1) What is the roadmap to cloud computing and how to get started? 2) How can we ensure security and compliance in a cloud environment? 3) How should we manage and operate the cloud infrastructure?
What specific trends in cloud computing have you observed in the past year?
Fung: The major trends in cloud computing in 2010 were:
"The [Chinese] government has recently identified cloud computing as a strategic initiative and will pilot the development of cloud computing services in five cities."
-- K C Fung, EMC Hong Kong |
The discussion around cloud computing has shifted from concept and why to implement, to how to implement. The view of "cloud computing as the way to transform IT" has been widely accepted by the industry in the past few years.
Technology breakthroughs are in multiple areas:
- Server virtualization: Mature technology enables mainstream mission-critical applications to be virtualized and hosted in a cloud based infrastructure (e.g. VMware vSphere);
- Networking: Higher bandwidth (e.g. 10G) and connectivity options (e.g. L2 connectivity for wide area, FCoE) have enabled more flexibility in building cloud based infrastructure (e.g. Cisco Nexus and OTV);
- Storage: Sophisticated storage technologies like SSD, Fully Automated Storage Tiering, Thin Provisioning and Storage Federation are key enablers for building cloud based infrastructures (e.g. EMC CLARiiON and EMC VPlex);
- A new suite of software capabilities for provisioning, management and orchestration of virtual resources pool that accelerates the Journey to the Private Cloud (e.g. VMWare vCloud Director).
What specific trends in cloud computing do you foresee for the next three years?
Fung: Enterprises will be more aggressive in virtualizing their data centers and moving to private cloud infrastructure as they see the tremendous benefits of virtualized data centers (e.g. cost savings, green benefits, increased operational efficiency and productivity improvement, among others)
- More cloud service providers will become available and more workloads will be moved from private data centers to cloud service providers;
- Proliferation of iPad-type mobile devices will drive more cloud services tailored for those users;
- Virtual desktop technology will take off.
What is the current state of cloud computing adoption in Asia?
Fung: We see great potential in this region for cloud computing adoption, especially in the China market as the central government has recently identified cloud computing as a strategic initiative and will pilot the development of cloud computing services in five cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Wuxi), while the Hong Kong market needs to catch up with its neighbors, particularly in public cloud service offerings.
A few discussions about cloud compliance and industry standards are going on in the ICT community at present? What's your take on this?
Fung: We are pleased to see the discussions on cloud compliance and industry standards. This is one of the strongest indicators that the community is getting serious about the adoption and implementation of cloud computing technologies. We believe that compliance and standards are more relevant in a public cloud or hybrid cloud environment, which means that the adoption of private cloud technology for enterprises should not be affected.
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