EMC World Day 2: Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 3.0

The Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is the packaging of an engineered, tested hybrid cloud stack built around the Federation stack: with vSphere and the vRealize suite at the center, vCloud Air as the public cloud target, ViPR as the storage abstraction/automation layer. 

As I said in the BLOCKS, RACKS, APPLIANCES post here, converged infrastructure isn’t a “cloud easy button”.  What it converged infrastructure in all it’s forms (Vblock, VxBlock, VxRack, VSPEX Blue) does is let you stop mucking with infrastructure and focus on things that are more important – like building a well-run Enterprise Hybrid Cloud.

The thing that DOES make a cloud is the cloud management and orchestration layer – namely the vSphere vRealize suite (and other things too – like Openstack).   But – none of those stacks are “turn key” or easy to assemble.   I’ve talked to customers

The Federation Enterprise Hybrid cloud is an engineered cloud management stack.   There is a truck-load of engineering – because it packages all our experiences into tight workflows, puppet manifests, integration with other ITSM tools, with backup, DR, security, NSX, ViPR and with other parts of infrastructure.  It is ready to go – for most customers at scales below 10’s of thousands of VMs it’s like ordering a burger :-) 

For the largest customers in the world (at scales of many tens to hundreds of thousands of VMs), the Federation EHC is a great starting point.   Inevitably at those scales, you can’t make it like ordering a burger – but for every customer we deliver, we build the learning back into the “product” that is the Federation EHC stack.

It can be delivered by EMC or EMC partners that have been certified.

… And, yes - at the physical layer, EHC is deployed BEST and FASTEST on the EMC/VCE Converged infrastructure family of BLOCKS (Vblock/VxBlock).   In the future, EHC will work on RACKS (VxRack), and further out, on APPLIANCES (VSPEX Blue).

The pitch is quite simple: there is no better, no faster, no more secure/flexible/feature rich way to deploy an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud – and fundamentally, every customer needs to do that to drive agility and innovation.   The formula is proven.   Use it and you will have an IaaS hybrid cloud in weeks.

What’s new in EHC 3.0:

• Updates of the VMware vSphere, NSX and vRealize Suite along with EMC components including the ViPR Controller
• VCE will now assemble the Federation EHC stack on a Vblock or a VxBlock in the factory – making it even easier and more turnkey and lowering the cost of deployment.
• Applications as a Service - New rich application blueprint capabilities, including Puppet Manifests
• Hadoop as a Service
• Support for ScaleIO as the storage target, as well as updates for VMAX3, VPLEX and Isilon targets (both in Vblock/VxBlock and also in mix-and-match)
• Deep Puppet Integration.
• Service Now Integration
• Initial Cloudlink Integration for Data at Rest Encryption as a service (in other words, portable across clouds)

The documents (solution guides, reference architecture docs, sizing, etc) will be published soon here.

Here’s a great demonstration of the Application as a Service capabilities!

Are you a EHC customer, an EHC Partner?   Would love to hear your experiences – and frankly, would love to hear from people who have tried to assemble this sort of stack on their own!