What Makes EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Different?

EMC announced a series of powerful hybrid cloud solutions and services this week built up on our previously discussed EMC Hybrid Cloud solution.  As a refresher, the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud will be available in three different editions:

  • EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, Federation SDDC Edition – a hybrid cloud solution based on our Federation partner VMware’s technologies
  • EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft Edition – a hybrid cloud solution that leverages the powerful stack of cloud automation tools from Microsoft.  Think EMC and Microsoft aren’t well acquainted?  We’ve won Microsoft Partner of the Year a total of 22 times.  We’ll go into that more in a future post.
  • EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, OpenStack Edition – a hybrid cloud solution that shows our commitment to OpenStack.

You’ve probably heard or seen a good deal  of this news already, so what am I going to add to the conversation?  I wanted to dig into  what makes EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud different.  Why didn’t we just call it Enterprise Hybrid Cloud?  What makes it “EMC” Enterprise Hybrid Cloud?  Read on.

Custom Integration with EMC Products

One of the things that makes EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (we’ll still use EHC for short) unique is integration with EMC technologies.  The EHC Federation SDDC Edition includes VMware’s powerful set of cloud automation and orchestration tools, including vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) and vCenter Orchestrator.  We’ve used these tools to create custom workflows that integrate our products directly into the hybrid cloud, providing powerful functionality that the VMware stack is not capable of out of the box.  That’s an example of the type of integration we’ve included in EHC.

We’ve created custom integration between vCAC and Avamar to provide powerful data protection capabilities built right into the cloud.  This integration allows for on-demand backup and recovery of cloud provisioned virtual machines, eliminating the need for end users or developers to rely on IT for these services.  When provisioning new virtual machines, users can also select their backup service tier and have their workload automatically protected.

EMC is uniquely positioned to offer this integration – these are our products, after all, and we have tight alignment between said product groups to support this.  When you consider the power of VMware’s technology automating EMC’s hardware and software stack, you can start to see why there has been tremendous interest in EHC.

EMC Support

It’s not surprising that organizations are hiring companies to help them adopt IT as a Service (ITaaS) and deploy their own private and hybrid clouds.  There are many different companies that offer this service today, but not many that offer what EMC offers: support.  EMC treats EHC similar to a product just like any of our other hardware or software products, and as such provides customer support.

If we’ve workecust serv repsd with a customer to deploy EHC and they have a problem, they can pick up the phone and call the same number they’d use today if they were having a problem with their VMAX array.

This level of support is another differentiating factor for EMC’s EHC offering.  We built it, we help customers deploy it, and then we stand behind it.

EMC Services

Of course, I saved the best for last – EMC’s services to help customers deploy EHC and adopt ITaaS.  Trust me when I say that although I’m part of the EMC  Global Services team and it’s hard to be impartial, what we have done for services around EHC is truly remarkable.

Customers tell us that they’ve overwhelmed with operational support of their infrastructures and often don’t have the time or resources to transform the way they want.  Even if they have the required resources, the technical know-how involved with hybrid cloud spans numerous technologies and processes, leading to long deployment times and higher risk.

EMC has developed services that can stand up EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud for our customers in as little as 28 days.  That’s right – we’re able to do in only 28 days what customers have told us would normally take them months to complete on their own.  Let’s face it, customers are being confronted  with shadow IT challenges and losing control of workloads to public cloud providers because their IT organization simply cannot offer  services to match what Amazon and others can provide.  The accelerated deployment benefit from EMC is designed specifically to address that gap – taking customers from nothing to a fully functional hybrid cloud that can provide true cloud services to their end-users within a very short period of time.

We’re in an exciting time in the IT industry as the cloud is rapidly transforming not only customers but also companies like EMC too.  EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is proof of that – we’ve created a solution that differentiates ourselves from others with our technologies, our support, and perhaps most importantly, our services to help customers achieve their goals.

Have a question about EHC?  Feel free to leave a comment in this blog or even find me on Twitter for a quick chat.

About the Author: Matt Liebowitz

Matt Liebowitz is the Global Multicloud lead for the Dell Technologies Consulting Services Portfolio. He focuses on thought leadership and service development for multicloud, automation and data center related Consulting services. Matt has been named a VMware vExpert every year since 2010 and is a frequent blogger and author on a wide range of cloud related topics. Matt has been a co-author on three virtualization-focused books, including Virtualizing Microsoft Business-critical Applications on VMware vSphere and VMware vSphere Performance. He is also a frequent speaker at the VMware Explore and Dell Technologies World conferences.