Manoj Chugh,
President,
EMC (India & SAARC)
EMC's adoption of the private cloud began in 2004, when EMC realized growing IT challenges of data deluge, expansion and growth of servers and applications in the data center. EMC IT has been concentrating first on its internal infrastructure to prepare for transition to the cloud, and virtualization is at the core of this effort. “By transitioning to a private cloud-based IT infrastructure and using advanced capabilities such an infrastructure provides, EMC IT's ultimate goal is to enable end-to-end, on-demand self-service provisioning of IT services to its internal audience - the business units at EMC. Today, we are getting closer to being 100% virtualized and are heading in the direction where we will see everything as a service,” says Manoj Chugh, President, EMC (India & SAARC).
Many vendors today are not set up with an end-to-end offering to make enterprise IT departments successful in this transition. This is due to a number of factors. Today's integrated offerings may result in vendor lock-in rather than an integrated offering of best-of-breed capabilities. They can, in turn, also hamper the ability of an IT department to easily migrate workloads, incorporate new applications and upgrade operating systems. There are also major considerations around security and access while considering cloud.
To counter this, EMC recommends a phased migration approach to customers. It all starts with virtualization of servers and storage:
Start with Consolidation - storage, networks, applications, data centers. Storage consolidation alone can realize 2:1 savings
Virtualization - a means for server consolidation - regularly accomplishes 10:1 or better ratios of virtual to physical instances Build in security through identity assurance & access control, encryption & key management, compliance & security information management and fraud protection.
Tiering - EMC has long advocated tiered storage and at 25% TCO advantages, the economic benefits are compelling Deduplicaiton of data is another means for significant data reductions, especially in the backup operations Then apply software and process automation for further benefits Evaluate costs of setting up a private cloud internally vis-à-vis partnering with an external cloud service offerings vendor to identify which model is more suitable.
Enterprises can also engage vendors like recently formed Acadia (formerly Alpine), a Cisco- EMC joint solutions company that builds, operates, and transfers Vblock infrastructure to organizations that want to accelerate their journey to pervasive virtualization and private cloud.
During 2009, virtualization was seen to have found acceptance both at the server and desktop level and it promises to be the biggest opportunity in 2010. Virtualization is an early and important step on the journey to private cloud for enterprises. Security consistently ranks as CIOs' top concern for the public cloud. But a private cloud presents an opportunity to strengthen security and compliance by building them into definitions and management of specific data and other assets. The organization's current security infrastructure (including firewalls, encryption and passwords) remains at work in a private cloud.
One can also embed the rules of access, use, location and management of assets into their virtual containers. And one can do this at his own pace starting with most sensitive information and applications. With private cloud, security and compliance are not problems but areas of opportunities.
In the physical world, people and processes are siloed and separate groups focus on storage, servers, networks, endpoints, and so on. “In the cloud, many of these operations and roles will converge and we are likely to see virtual machine administrators who are playing all these roles of network, storage and server administrator simultaneously. This convergence of roles brings about new challenges, which will force us to rethink policies and related processes for hands off between the security teams responsible for governing information infrastructure and the operations teams that have to ensure quality of service,” Manoj Chugh explains.
Finally...
Manoj concludes on a very affirmative note by saying that enterprises will adopt the “private cloud” model and most organizations in India have already done this by virtualizing their servers and some IT infrastructure. A private cloud creates fully virtualized next-generation IT infrastructure, spanning internal and external resources. Such a model allows enterprises to leverage the transformational power of cloud computing without having to lose control of their IT infrastructure.
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samrita@varindia.com
