This white paper is the first in a series of EMC IT Proven papers describing EMC ITs initiative to move toward a private cloud-based IT infrastructure. EMC IT defines the private cloud as the next-generation IT infrastructure comprising both internal and external clouds that enables efficiency, control, and choice for the internal IT organization.
Cloud Infrastructure and Services (CIS) - WebinarEMC
Between 2012 and 2020, the patch of the digital universe that CIOs and their IT staffs need to manage will become not just bigger but also more complex. The skills, experience, and resources to manage all these bits of data will become scarcer and more specialized, requiring a new, flexible, and scalable IT infrastructure that extends beyond the enterprise: cloud computing. By 2020, nearly 40% of the information in the digital universe will be "touched" by cloud computing providers - meaning that a byte. The Cloud Infrastructure and Services (CIS) session educates participants about cloud deployment and service models, cloud infrastructure, and the key considerations in migrating to cloud computing.
INDUSTRY-LEADING TECHNOLOGY FOR LONG TERM RETENTION OF BACKUPS IN THE CLOUDEMC
CloudBoost is a cloud-enabling solution from EMC
Facilitates secure, automatic, efficient data transfer to private and public clouds for Long-Term Retention (LTR) of backups. Seamlessly extends existing data protection solutions to elastic, resilient, scale-out cloud storage
Cloud Infrastructure and Services (CIS) - WebinarEMC
Between 2012 and 2020, the patch of the digital universe that CIOs and their IT staffs need to manage will become not just bigger but also more complex. The skills, experience, and resources to manage all these bits of data will become scarcer and more specialized, requiring a new, flexible, and scalable IT infrastructure that extends beyond the enterprise: cloud computing. By 2020, nearly 40% of the information in the digital universe will be "touched" by cloud computing providers - meaning that a byte. The Cloud Infrastructure and Services (CIS) session educates participants about cloud deployment and service models, cloud infrastructure, and the key considerations in migrating to cloud computing.
INDUSTRY-LEADING TECHNOLOGY FOR LONG TERM RETENTION OF BACKUPS IN THE CLOUDEMC
CloudBoost is a cloud-enabling solution from EMC
Facilitates secure, automatic, efficient data transfer to private and public clouds for Long-Term Retention (LTR) of backups. Seamlessly extends existing data protection solutions to elastic, resilient, scale-out cloud storage
Time, as they say, is money. By automating your infrastructure and application delivery, you can help save your organization a lot of both.
Join cloud networking pros for this online workshop and live Q&A and see how the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite:
• Automates delivery of unified infrastructure designed to meet each of your application’s needs
• Reduces the complexity and manual provisioning of virtual network services
• Reduces the number of tools required to support cloud environments
Engage with Cisco experts, ask your questions, and see what it takes to make infrastructure automation a reality. Register now.
Sincerely,
Robb Boyd, TechWiseTV
Technology you can use from geeks you can trust.
www.cisco.com/go/techwisetv
Lots of ways to look at cloud computing. With System zEnterprise, you should be able to reduce your costs, reduce your risks, improve security and resilience and have investment protection for the future. See how.
My Presentation about EMC Academic Alliance Program at Mansoura University. In this presentation, I tried to present an introduction on the most four famous EMC courses, and an overlook on the most EMC famous products.
EMC IT's Journey to Cloud
PHASE 3: IT-AS-A-SERVICE
APPLICATIONS & CLOUD EXPERIENCE
See how EMC’s applications and cloud integration framework enable IT as a service.
Setting the Foundation for Data Center Virtualization Cisco Canada
Today the Data Centre is at the heart of IT and business innovations. As the Data Centre evolves from a pure cost centre to a strategic asset to achieve business goals, Cisco is evolving our Data Centre Architectural Framework to help accelerate IT Innovations that deliver better business value. Ed Bugnion will explain that to do this successfully it is important to have a reliable and strategic roadmap to establish the DC foundation, the virtualized services that support the key cloud capabilities such as automation, provisioning and metering.
Deploying Applications in Today’s Network InfrastructureCisco Canada
This presentation prepares networking engineers for the fundamentals of deploying application in today’s server virtualization infrastructure. The objectives for this presentation is to share best practices, tips and tricks on how best to implement Cisco technology such as Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus 1000v with any virtualization stack. During this presentation we will analyze and dissect two server virtualization use cases recently architected. These use cases consist of a multi -tenant private cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure for thousands of users.
Converged Data Center: FCoE, iSCSI, & the Future of Storage Networking ( EMC ...EMC
This session explores the opportunities and challenges of using a single network to support both storage and networking. The Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP) protocols offer two approaches for supporting storage over Ethernet. Standards, technologies and deployment scenarios for both protocols will be covered, along with the future of storage networking technology.
Objective 1: Describe FCoE and iSCSI and how they fit into existing storage and networking infrastructure.
After this session you will be able to:
Objective 2: Explain how FCoE and iSCSI solutions provide storage networking options for Ethernet, including 10Gb Ethernet.
Objective 3: Describe some of the opportunities and challenges of converging storage and networking environments.
Managing Storage - Trends, Challenges, Options in 2013 - 2014EMC
What are the challenges companies face to build strong storage management organizations - according to the latest study of over 1,000 storage professionals worldwide. This highly anticipated annual session discusses the options you have in this skill-starved industry. Compare, correlate and refine your plans with the overall trends and practices in the storage industry including the impact of IT transformation (virtualization, cloud, Big Data) on an organization.
Time, as they say, is money. By automating your infrastructure and application delivery, you can help save your organization a lot of both.
Join cloud networking pros for this online workshop and live Q&A and see how the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite:
• Automates delivery of unified infrastructure designed to meet each of your application’s needs
• Reduces the complexity and manual provisioning of virtual network services
• Reduces the number of tools required to support cloud environments
Engage with Cisco experts, ask your questions, and see what it takes to make infrastructure automation a reality. Register now.
Sincerely,
Robb Boyd, TechWiseTV
Technology you can use from geeks you can trust.
www.cisco.com/go/techwisetv
Lots of ways to look at cloud computing. With System zEnterprise, you should be able to reduce your costs, reduce your risks, improve security and resilience and have investment protection for the future. See how.
My Presentation about EMC Academic Alliance Program at Mansoura University. In this presentation, I tried to present an introduction on the most four famous EMC courses, and an overlook on the most EMC famous products.
EMC IT's Journey to Cloud
PHASE 3: IT-AS-A-SERVICE
APPLICATIONS & CLOUD EXPERIENCE
See how EMC’s applications and cloud integration framework enable IT as a service.
Setting the Foundation for Data Center Virtualization Cisco Canada
Today the Data Centre is at the heart of IT and business innovations. As the Data Centre evolves from a pure cost centre to a strategic asset to achieve business goals, Cisco is evolving our Data Centre Architectural Framework to help accelerate IT Innovations that deliver better business value. Ed Bugnion will explain that to do this successfully it is important to have a reliable and strategic roadmap to establish the DC foundation, the virtualized services that support the key cloud capabilities such as automation, provisioning and metering.
Deploying Applications in Today’s Network InfrastructureCisco Canada
This presentation prepares networking engineers for the fundamentals of deploying application in today’s server virtualization infrastructure. The objectives for this presentation is to share best practices, tips and tricks on how best to implement Cisco technology such as Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus 1000v with any virtualization stack. During this presentation we will analyze and dissect two server virtualization use cases recently architected. These use cases consist of a multi -tenant private cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure for thousands of users.
Converged Data Center: FCoE, iSCSI, & the Future of Storage Networking ( EMC ...EMC
This session explores the opportunities and challenges of using a single network to support both storage and networking. The Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP) protocols offer two approaches for supporting storage over Ethernet. Standards, technologies and deployment scenarios for both protocols will be covered, along with the future of storage networking technology.
Objective 1: Describe FCoE and iSCSI and how they fit into existing storage and networking infrastructure.
After this session you will be able to:
Objective 2: Explain how FCoE and iSCSI solutions provide storage networking options for Ethernet, including 10Gb Ethernet.
Objective 3: Describe some of the opportunities and challenges of converging storage and networking environments.
Managing Storage - Trends, Challenges, Options in 2013 - 2014EMC
What are the challenges companies face to build strong storage management organizations - according to the latest study of over 1,000 storage professionals worldwide. This highly anticipated annual session discusses the options you have in this skill-starved industry. Compare, correlate and refine your plans with the overall trends and practices in the storage industry including the impact of IT transformation (virtualization, cloud, Big Data) on an organization.
FC/FCoE - Topologies, Protocols, and Limitations ( EMC World 2012 )EMC
An in-depth discussion of the FC and FCoE protocols focusing on the topologies that are currently supported, those under development and any known issues. The current EMC best practices are also reviewed and the reasons behind them explained.
The world’s information is doubling every two years. In 2011 the world created a staggering 1.8 zettabytes. By 2020 the world will generate 50 times the amount of information and 75 times the number of "information containers", while IT staff to manage it will grow less than 1.5 times. This session introduces students to various storage networking, & business continuity terminologies.
This session provides a brief overview of the various models available for adopting cloud and their strategic considerations, ranging from providing Enterprise class service to business alignment. This session also explores the infrastructure, management, and benefits of cloud computing and cloud storage.
Objective 1: Understand the various cloud models and their associated benefits and considerations.
After this session you will be able to:
Objective 2: Gain a high-level understanding of technologies that EMC can provide to accelerate adoption of the cloud models.
Objective 3: Understand the tactical approaches to cloud consumption available to their organization based on its needs and transformation phase.
Watch the recordings via http://www.brainshark.com/emcworld/vu?pi=zGfzHnlI1zB8sLz0
Storage Area Networking: SAN Technology Update & Best Practice Deep Dive for ...EMC
Maintaining a high performance and highly available SAN requires you to understand the recent SAN developments and to possess an in-depth understanding of the problems you can encounter as well as the recommended best practices that have been created to avoid them. Join us for a discussion about the latest developments in the SAN space, the latest best practices and how they apply to FC, FCoE and iSCSI.
Objective 1: Describe the recent changes in the SAN space.
After this session you will be able to:
Objective 2: Describe EMC’s best practices and how they help reduce risk.
Objective 3: Understand trends with Cloud (IaaS) and how they do (and do not) intersect with traditional SANs.
Keynote talk by David Dietrich, EMC Education Services at ICCBDA 2013 : International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Analytics
http://twitter.com/imdaviddietrich
http://infocus.emc.com/author/david_dietrich/
RSA-Pivotal Security Big Data Reference ArchitectureEMC
This paper talks about how customers can use RSA and Pivotal to get better visibility into their environments, more context to help them prioritize issues, and actionable intelligence from a diverse set of sources
A consolidated version of my portfolio for application to Michigan State University's Design Specialization.
The presentation is simplistic to allow focus on the design elements of the work itself.
EMC IT's Journey to Cloud :
PHASE 2: BUSINESS PRODUCTION
VIRTUAL DESKTOP
Follow EMC’s rollout of Virtual Desktop to empower users and automate desktop management.
EMC IT's Journey to Cloud : BUSINESS PRODUCTION BACKUP & RECOVERY SYSTEMSEMC
EMC IT's Journey to Cloud
PHASE 2: BUSINESS PRODUCTION
BACKUP & RECOVERY SYSTEMS
Discover how EMC uses its next generation deduplication, backup, and archiving.
This white paper documents the results of EMC IT's transformational journey and describes EMC IT's current overall organizational structure and strategic objectives.
White Paper: EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance Enhances EMC IT's Global ...EMC
This White Paper illustrates a synergistic model for deploying EMC's Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (DCA) with EMC IT's incumbent Global Data Warehouse infrastructure.
Configuration Compliance For Storage, Network & Server EMC
This white paper shows the benefits of integrating IT infrastructure management technologies such as Network Configuration Manager, Storage Configuration Advisor and vCenter Configuration Manager into the RSA Archer platform for Configuration Compliance.
Breakout session tijdens Proact's SYNC 2013.
VSPEX en vBlock Converged Infrastructure bouwblokken van hypervisor server network en storage.pptx
John Lavallée
Practice Mgr – Cloud Services EMEA
EMC | Global Services Partners
White Paper: EMC Compute-as-a-Service — EMC Ionix IT Orchestrator, VCE Vblock...EMC
This White Paper explores the integration of cloud technology components into a Compute-as-a-Service platform that enables service providers to deploy and manage cloud-based services and tenants to adopt and customize those services into their businesses.
This reference architecture highlights the end-user computing (EUC) deployment based on XtremIO all-flash array technology, builds an EUC environment, and validates the environment for performance, scalability, functionality, and user experience.
EMC's IT Transformation Journey ( EMC Forum 2014 )EMC
The Cloud transforms IT from being reactive into a business enabler improving your organizations agility. But IT Transformation is not just about technology. It involves changing IT roles, skills, and processes to adapt to the new IT paradigm. Led by EMC IT, let's come together in this insightful session to explore how to transform your IT infrastructure, operating model, and applications.
Reference Architecture: EMC Hybrid Cloud with VMwareEMC
This Reference Architecture introduces an EMC Enterprise Private Cloud solution for an on-premises infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering that enables IT to deliver private cloud-based services to their business. It describes the main features and functionality of the solution and the solution architecture and key components.
This White Paper outlines how EMC Compute-as-a-Service enables service providers to create a scalable foundation that allows them to deliver value-added services and create additional revenue streams.
White Paper: EMC Accelerates Journey to Big Data with Business Analytics as a...EMC
This white paper examines how EMC is exploiting the Big Data opportunity with a new agile model for analytics and reporting. Business-Analytics-as-a-Service (BAaaS) significantly reduces total cost of ownership and provides predictive analytics proficiency and increased business agility. The paper details BAaaS architecture, deployment, results, best practices, and early adopter use cases.
Software Defined Data Center: The Intersection of Networking and StorageEMC
There has been quite a bit of marketing rhetoric around Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) since VMware’s acquisition of Nicira. In this session we explore the components of a SDDC. Our specific focus is on the composition of a SDDC’s resource model: Compute, Networking, and Storage. The emphasis is on the disaggregated I/O for Network and Storage resources.
Objective 1: Describe the disaggregated I/O resource model employed to facilitate the use of virtualized Ethernet and Block devices in a Software Defined Data Center.
After this session you will be able to:
Objective 2: Explain how end-user driven provisioning of virtual Ethernet devices and Block devices serve to decouple resource use from infrastructure management.
Objective 3: Describe some of the opportunities and challenges associated with employing disaggregate I/O.
Category:Applications & Databases, Storage Automation & Management, Virtualization & Cloud Computing
Transforming Desktop Virtualization with Citrix XenDesktop and EMC XtremIOEMC
With EMC XtremIO all-flash array, improve
1) your competitive agility with real-time analytics & development
2) your infrastructure agility with elastic provisioning for performance & capacity
3) your TCO with 50% lower capex and opex and double the storage lifecycle.
• Citrix & EMC XtremIO: Better Together
• XtremIO Design Fundamentals for VDI
• Citrix XenDesktop & XtremIO
-- Image Management & Storage
-- Demonstrations
-- XtremIO XenDesktop Integration
EMC FORUM RESEARCH GLOBAL RESULTS - 10,451 RESPONSES ACROSS 33 COUNTRIES EMC
Explore findings from the EMC Forum IT Study and learn how cloud computing, social, mobile, and big data megatrends are shaping IT as a business driver globally.
Reference architecture with MIRANTIS OPENSTACK PLATFORM.The changes that are going on in IT with disruptions from technology, business and culture and so IT to solve the issues has to change from moving from traditional models to broker provider model.
Force Cyber Criminals to Shop Elsewhere
Learn the value of having an Identity Management and Governance solution and how retailers today are benefiting by strengthening their defenses and bolstering their Identity Management capabilities.
Container-based technology has experienced a recent revival and is becoming adopted at an explosive rate. For those that are new to the conversation, containers offer a way to virtualize an operating system. This virtualization isolates processes, providing limited visibility and resource utilization to each, such that the processes appear to be running on separate machines. In short, allowing more applications to run on a single machine. Here is a brief timeline of key moments in container history.
This white paper provides an overview of EMC's data protection solutions for the data lake - an active repository to manage varied and complex Big Data workloads
This infographic highlights key stats and messages from the analyst report from J.Gold Associates that addresses the growing economic impact of mobile cybercrime and fraud.
This white paper describes how an intelligence-driven governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) model can create an efficient, collaborative enterprise GRC strategy across IT, Finance, Operations, and Legal areas.
The Trust Paradox: Access Management and Trust in an Insecure AgeEMC
This white paper discusses the results of a CIO UK survey on a“Trust Paradox,” defined as employees and business partners being both the weakest link in an organization’s security as well as trusted agents in achieving the company’s goals.
2014 Cybercrime Roundup: The Year of the POS BreachEMC
This RSA fraud report summarizes cybercrime in 2014 and includes the number of phishing attacks globally, top hosting countries for phishing attacks, the financial impact of global fraud losses, and a monthly highlight.
EMC Isilon Best Practices for Hadoop Data StorageEMC
This paper describes the best practices for setting up and managing the HDFS service on an EMC Isilon cluster to optimize data storage for Hadoop analytics. This paper covers OneFS 7.2 or later.
The Evolution of IP Storage and Its Impact on the NetworkEMC
This white paper addresses the increased stresses on infrastructure resulting from virtualization and the importance of attending to infrastructure design and support, especially with regard to the network.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
Le nuove frontiere dell'AI nell'RPA con UiPath Autopilot™UiPathCommunity
In questo evento online gratuito, organizzato dalla Community Italiana di UiPath, potrai esplorare le nuove funzionalità di Autopilot, il tool che integra l'Intelligenza Artificiale nei processi di sviluppo e utilizzo delle Automazioni.
📕 Vedremo insieme alcuni esempi dell'utilizzo di Autopilot in diversi tool della Suite UiPath:
Autopilot per Studio Web
Autopilot per Studio
Autopilot per Apps
Clipboard AI
GenAI applicata alla Document Understanding
👨🏫👨💻 Speakers:
Stefano Negro, UiPath MVPx3, RPA Tech Lead @ BSP Consultant
Flavio Martinelli, UiPath MVP 2023, Technical Account Manager @UiPath
Andrei Tasca, RPA Solutions Team Lead @NTT Data
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Generative AI Deep Dive: Advancing from Proof of Concept to ProductionAggregage
Join Maher Hanafi, VP of Engineering at Betterworks, in this new session where he'll share a practical framework to transform Gen AI prototypes into impactful products! He'll delve into the complexities of data collection and management, model selection and optimization, and ensuring security, scalability, and responsible use.
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
Leading Change strategies and insights for effective change management pdf 1.pdf
EMC IT's Journey to the Private Cloud: A Practitioner's Guide
1. White Paper
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD:
A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE
Abstract
This white paper describes EMC IT’s journey to cloud-based IT
infrastructure. EMC IT defines the cloud as the next-generation
dynamic IT infrastructure comprising both internal and external
(hybrid) clouds that enables efficiency, control, and choice for
the internal IT organization.
September 2011
3. Table of Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .......................................................................................... 4
INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 5
Audience ............................................................................................................ 5
AN INTRODUCTION TO EMC IT ................................................................................................................. 5
Principles and priorities ..................................................................................... 6
EMC IT’s CLOUD COMPUTING STRATEGY: A KEY TO REALIZING IT PRIORITIES ........................................... 7
EMC IT’s evolution to IT as a Service (ITaaS) ........................................................................................... 9
Planning the transition to the cloud....................................................................................................... 13
Step 1: Build the foundation .................................................................................................................. 14
Step 2: Accelerate change ..................................................................................................................... 15
Step 3: Focus on the advantages of service management ...................................................................... 15
Building EMC’s private cloud infrastructure ...........................................................................................16
1. Server virtualization and consolidation .............................................................................................. 17
2. Optimized storage and backup/recovery ........................................................................................... 17
3. Security ............................................................................................................................................ 18
4. Management and automation .......................................................................................................... 18
5. Applications and cloud experience ................................................................................................... 18
Virtual desktop infrastructure—an implementation use case .................................................................19
MAKING THE TRANSITION TO THE PRIVATE CLOUD ..................................................................................19
CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 22
References ....................................................................................................... 23
CONTACT US ..................................................................................................... 24
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 3
4. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
EMC is transforming its IT operations to improve its customer focus, create business
transformation, and deliver operational efficiencies. To achieve these goals, EMC IT
has embraced the hybrid cloud approach to IT infrastructure. EMC IT defines the
hybrid cloud as the next-generation IT infrastructure comprising both internal
(private) and external (public) clouds that enables efficiency, control, and choice for
the internal IT organization.
By transitioning to a hybrid cloud-based IT infrastructure, and using the advanced
capabilities that 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 customers, the
business units at EMC.
EMC IT has been concentrating first on its internal infrastructure to prepare for the
transition to the cloud—and virtualization is at the core of this effort in shaping the
new infrastructure. EMC IT has defined key programs, introduced in this white paper,
that are focused on the various components of the enterprise data center. Each
initiative’s goal is to move EMC further along on its vision to build integrated
infrastructures for virtualization at scale. Separate white papers describing each
initiative are available that provide more information on EMC IT’s respective
strategies in moving toward a cloud-based IT infrastructure.
In parallel, EMC IT is developing policies and governance mechanisms for managing
the new IT services paradigm. EMC IT has also designed frameworks for preparing the
organization at various levels for the transition to the private cloud.
EMC IT’s structured approach helps accelerate its journey to the private cloud by
enabling the organization to get started with cloud initiatives versus waiting for
complete solutions to emerge. By building solutions using existing technologies—in
line with global trends—EMC IT hopes to adapt them to new technologies when they
become available.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 4
5. INTRODUCTION
This white paper, the first in a series describing EMC IT’s initiative to move toward a
private cloud-based IT infrastructure, includes the following sections:
• An introduction to EMC IT
• EMC IT’s cloud computing strategy: a key to realizing IT priorities
• Making the transition to the private cloud
It describes EMC IT’s cloud computing strategy, how the strategy evolved, and the
three steps in transitioning to the cloud. Key programs also are introduced and the
use case that helped EMC move toward an integrated infrastructure for virtualization.
Audience
This white paper is intended for IT program managers, IT architects, and IT
management.
AN INTRODUCTION TO EMC IT
EMC Corporation, a global leader in cloud computing technology and solutions, has a
large internal IT organization that supports the business operations of its global
workforce.
EMC IT supports more than 48,000 users; across 400 corporate offices; in more than
80 countries; spanning five data centers; hosting 500 applications and 8 petabytes
(PB) of data.. Like all IT organizations, EMC IT faces the challenge of balancing cost,
risk, and agility in its operations and has a strong focus on delighting its customers.
The functionality, interoperability, and performance requirements of its internal
customers must be satisfied as much as possible—without compromising the
security, ease of use, and manageability of IT systems and processes.
In the past, EMC IT has had to address perceived and real objections from business
units. These objections have ranged from costs to project delivery concerns around
quality and speed). EMC IT has been empathetic to the business units’ concerns and
taken a methodical approach to transform its abilities and capabilities to resolve
these by adapting the organization, its processes, and technology. EMC IT must also
justify all of its investments with strong, metrics-based business cases that
demonstrate return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) before
receiving management approvals.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 5
6. Principles and priorities
EMC IT, just as any other enterprise IT organization, is impacted by a number of
factors: external, internal, IT factors, and technology factors, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Factors impacting EMC IT and EMC IT’s key priorities
EMC IT has defined five key priorities to address the factors described above:
• Efficiency—Helping business units increase their efficiencies and lower the
overall cost of operations by increasing IT efficiency and reducing IT operational
costs.
• Total customer experience—Enabling agility, automation, flexibility, and ease
of use for the IT customer.
• Workforce productivity—Increasing global employee productivity through
innovative applications, and investing in communication and collaboration
technologies such as social computing and telepresence.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 6
7. • Architect for the future—Making IT investments toward architecting the
desired future state—as well as future-proofing solutions so they accommodate
future requirements and changes.
• EMC “IT Proven”—EMC IT uses “IT Proven“ solutions to drive efficiency and
quality of service, increase IT agility, and prepare EMC for a dynamic future in the
Cloud.
EMC IT believes the hybrid cloud is a key component of satisfying these priorities.
EMC IT’s CLOUD COMPUTING STRATEGY:
A KEY TO REALIZING IT PRIORITIES
EMC IT has embarked on a bold mission to move to a hybrid cloud-based
infrastructure. EMC defines the hybrid cloud as the next-generation IT infrastructure
that provides all of the benefits of cloud-based IT systems (for example: agility,
quality of service (QoS), performance, scalability, security, and management) even as
it retains complete control of the IT infrastructure. A hybrid cloud may use internal
resources (private cloud), external resources (public cloud, delivered via service
providers), or a combination of both, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. EMC IT’s cloud strategy
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 7
8. Cloud computing enables EMC to create an elastic, agile environment that provides
business units with the ability to scale their IT resource requirements based on actual
needs. Resource utilization is improved by provisioning the infrastructure for normal,
rather than peak loads, with greater agility. By using the services of external cloud
service providers and third parties, cloud-based IT can transform fixed costs into
variable costs. This model also offers the benefits of increased choice, self-
provisioning, and utility-based chargeback models as well as the benefits of
next-generation security, compliance, and service delivery management.
EMC IT believes cloud computing has a few differentiating characteristics:
• IT is built differently using a pooled architecture solution with defined service
catalogs for each IT service and the ability to partition/move workloads to where
they can best run. These solutions are integrated and predictable in their
operational nature.
• IT is run differently by using low- and zero-touch modes for IT operations,
provisioning, and management.
• IT is consumed differently where end consumers of IT services can benefit
from on-demand provisioning of IT, based on immediate requirements, and from
multiple IT service providers.
• IT is governed differently from QoS for services to security as new sets of
rules and roles emerge.
Transitioning to a cloud-based model provides the IT organization with the benefits of
flexibility, efficiency, and dynamic, on-demand resource allocation. However, the IT
organization may need to divest some of the control and choice of IT components to a
third-party provider of cloud services, if external service providers are involved. It is in
this context that EMC’s IT governance model in the cloud environment becomes more
significant. Therefore, it is obvious to assume that systematic changes to personnel
structure and roles, processes, and practices—along with converged advanced
technology—are needed in unison for cloud computing to successfully be adopted.
EMC believes that the capabilities of the hybrid cloud will first evolve in the private
cloud and then federate out into the public and partner clouds. The private cloud
has to integrate with the public cloud (for example, SaaS providers such as
Salesforce.com), but EMC IT’s cloud strategy includes federation models where
appropriate aspects of peak workloads could be deployed to service provider public
clouds as well.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 8
9. EMC IT’s evolution to IT as a Service (ITaaS)
The EMC IT environment has continued to be transformed over many years and
through many internal projects a stable infrastructure and data center architecture
had successfully been established. However, it was clear that more efficiencies could
be gained from the environment, and that led to the next series of transformations
related to our journey to the cloud.
The internal virtual data center is at the core of EMC’s vision of the private cloud.
Virtualization is a key enabling technology of the private cloud. Virtualization is the
ability to increase the utilization of physical resources through techniques such as
pooling and multiplexing. The evolution to the cloud phase of our story begins with
a process of standardization and by using virtualization effectively across all
components of the data center infrastructure, namely compute systems, storage,
network, security, monitoring and management, the application stack—all the way up
to the desktop. To effectively pursue virtualization we were aware of the assets in our
IT ecosystem and the characteristics of their use. We had also determined that our
strategy simplified the environment by defining a set of standard solutions.
Figure 3 illustrates this evolution, which involves redefining the IT organization’s
mandate from being a provider of stand-alone components to being a provider of fully
integrated, tested, validated, and ready-to-grow infrastructure and application
packages that contain best-in-class components for a data center. The platform
adopted by EMC IT is based on the standard x86 architecture (while moving away
from traditional UNIX-based “big iron” systems), with a goal of 100 percent
virtualization leveraging VMware® vSphere™.
Figure 3. EMC IT's infrastructure evolution
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 9
10. The goal of EMC IT’s transition to the private cloud is to achieve the ability to offer IT
as a Service (ITaaS) to internal customers—the business units at EMC—with options
for self-provisioning through a portal interface. As shown in Figure 4, EMC IT is
starting to offer services at various levels, including:
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers EMC business units the ability to
provision infrastructure components such as network, storage, compute, and
operating systems as a service.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides the secure application and information
frameworks on top of application server, web server, database, unstructured
content management, and security components as a service to business units
from which to develop solutions.
• Software as a Service (SaaS) provides applications and tools in a services
model for business enablement.
• User Interface as a Service (UIaaS) provisions the user and the interface
experience, rather than provisioning the actual device used.
Figure 4. EMC’s IT as a Service Framework
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 10
11. In this model, IT is more than a supplier—IT becomes a business partner—and both IT
and the business benefit. With access to IT as a Service, the business benefits from
the following:
• Simplicity of self-service access
• Alignment of costs with utility with a pay-for-use utility model
• Agility for faster time-to-market and the flexibility to change
• A user-centric, outcome-based approach to supporting business goals
The benefits for IT include: efficiency through automation of tasks to do more faster;
elasticity to acquire, deploy, change, or release on-demand; greater visibility into
costs and control over service levels for better responsiveness; and greater control
over the IT environment.
The next step in the journey is the ability to achieve federation of data and resources
between data centers, beginning with internal virtual data centers and going on to
federation between private and public clouds. The aim is to equip the IT organization
with the capabilities to move data and resources between internal and third-party
data centers to achieve the real benefits of elastic IT provisioning.
EMC IT recommends that to manage the progression shown in Figure 5, it is necessary
to set up a converged technology architecture roadmap that further develops the
components of the ecosystem. Figure 5 shows the path EMC IT has been on over the
last several years, but it also clearly depicts the forward-looking elements that we
believe will be part of the cloud journey. Note how the areas of Compute systems,
Storage, Networks, Backup & Recovery, and Management & Automation start out as
separate towers but converge in the cloud.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 11
12. Figure 5. EMC IT's roadmap of the transition to the hybrid cloud
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 12
13. Planning the transition to the cloud
EMC believes that in order to transform the IT organization, it isn’t enough to just
concentrate on changing the technology aspects. An IT transformation initiative must
address five perspectives:
• Technology
• Business capabilities and user experience
• People
• Operations
• IT policies/process/governance
Moreover, it is essential not only consider these elements in isolation, but also
to assess and plan for the complex interactions among them. In line with the
components of an IT transformation initiative, EMC believes there are essentially
three phases of adoption for organizations that are considering a private cloud
strategy at the enterprise level and are at various phases. They are shown in Figure 6.
The IT Production phase, which targets dev/test/IT applications for virtualization
to achieve cost efficiencies. Key capabilities leveraged include shared resource pools
and elastic capacity.
The Business Production phase, which enables business applications, including
mission-critical applications with an emphasis on high QoS. Key capabilities
leveraged include a zero-touch infrastructure and increased control combined with
service assurance.
The IT as a Service phase, which was introduced earlier and emphasizes
business agility. Key capabilities include service definition, service catalog, self-
service, and chargeback.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 13
14. Figure 6. EMC IT's journey to the cloud
Each phase is characterized by: business drivers and triggers; level of sponsorship
for virtualization; types of applications virtualized; percentage of the x86 server
infrastructure virtualized; and the IT competencies acquired along the journey.
Success is measured by tracking business value realized (the value path). Examples
include the areas of ongoing financial and productivity results achieved along the
journey to the cloud, such as CAPEX and OPEX savings and improved business agility.
When considering these three phases of adoption, it is important to plan the
transition in measured steps as follows.
Step 1: Build the foundation
As a first step, EMC has been working on building the foundations at the technical
level. This involves reaching out to technology practitioners in the IT organization to
share information on basic cloud-enabling technologies, their operations, and their
integration methodologies. Since virtualization is a key enabler of the transition to a
cloud-based infrastructure, it is critical that IT practitioners learn and understand the
impact of applying virtualization. Given the rapid pace of technology developments
and extensions in the areas of virtualization and cloud computing, it is important that
these discussions cover the current state of technology as well as trends, scenarios,
and alternatives that might emerge in this dynamic segment of the IT landscape.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 14
15. It is also critical to encourage technologists to look beyond individual pieces of the
technology and look toward an integrated view of how the various components work
together. This involves a number of domain-crossing discussions that bring together
experts from different fields such as storage, network, backup, and compute among
others. This requires investments in hiring and cultivating specialists who can provide
an overall solution view of cloud-based IT offerings and ensure the dissemination of
information, reference architectures, and product and solution documentation to the
technology audience. This also means that new roles such as ‘Cloud Infrastructure
Architect’, ‘Cloud Application Architect’, ‘Cloud Integration Architect’, and ‘Cloud
Information Architect’ have started to emerge.
Step 2: Accelerate change
From EMC IT’s experience, the next step in this process consists of bringing
discussions to the operations level with the delivery audience—those people focused
on delivering IT services to the business. These discussions should focus on the two
clear agendas of IT operations personnel:
• Leveraging new technologies to better meet key performance indicators used to
measure IT effectiveness
• Making organizational and process changes, including the policy and governance
mechanisms needed, to fully leverage the capabilities of the new technologies
Changes in technology can provide only limited benefits to businesses unless
accompanied by process and organizational change. Therefore, it is essential for
these discussions to challenge standard operating procedures, review default
assumptions around service levels and IT provisioning, and consider how IT is
accounted and paid for. These conversations may also result in the development of
new operational roles, metrics, and service delivery models patterned around the
concept of delivering IT as a Service. However, EMC has found during discussions at
this level that it is critical to recognize the close links between people and processes,
and pay careful attention to the complex interplays between operations, processes,
and organizational change.
Step 3: Focus on the advantages of service management
Business units may not fully understand the advantages in migrating to a private
cloud-based IT infrastructure beyond IT cost reduction. Therefore, EMC IT discovered
that it is critical to educate businesses leaders about the additional value that EMC IT
can create for them by leveraging the benefits of the cloud infrastructure. Discussions
with business units must focus on the enhanced service management benefits the
new infrastructure offers, such as:
• Introducing new services that can drive value to business units (for example, truly
elastic IT provisioning, choice of service providers, and utility chargeback models)
• Reducing the cycle time for businesses through self-service IT provisioning, choice
of multiple providers, and service level agreement-based IT service delivery
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 15
16. • Providing customers, clients, and employees with better user experiences through
optimized IT infrastructures
EMC IT recognizes that an important transformational initiative of this nature brings
with it the need for organizational change as well as a change in behavior from its
employees. Continuous education and communication are crucial to getting the
organization ready for this journey.
Building EMC’s private cloud infrastructure
At the heart of EMC’s transition to the private cloud is EMC IT’s “Virtualize Everything”
strategy, which focuses on virtualizing all elements of a data center: systems,
storage, network, security, monitoring and management, application stack
(applications, databases, middleware), and even the desktop.
EMC IT identified several key programs along with a use case (virtual desktop),
referenced in Figure 7, and described next, to make the transition to a private cloud-
based IT organization. The programs had a distinct foundational infrastructure and
applications focus in the IT Production and Business Production phases, and as EMC
IT enters the IT as a Service phase, they have more focus on service management and
service delivery.
Figure 7. Key programs leading to the private cloud
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17. 1. Server virtualization and consolidation
With the goals of improving the utilization of IT resources in data centers and
reducing the footprint of physical machines, EMC IT embarked on a server
virtualization and consolidation exercise across all of its enterprise data centers. Key
to this activity was a comprehensive inventory and analysis of the servers that existed
and a clear understanding of the business services supported by these servers. The IT
production phase of virtualizing IT-owned applications, including development and
test applications, was carried out from 2004 to 2008. By 2008, EMC had consolidated
1,250 servers into just 250 machines—a transition that reduced space requirements
by 60 percent and power and cooling costs by 70 percent. By ensuring that all new
solutions are VMware-compliant, and by following an aggressive plan to consolidate
another 1,600 servers to 40 servers over 2009-2010, EMC saved over $13 million in
costs and expects to save an additional $10 million over the next five years. EMC also
expects to dramatically reduce its carbon footprint and significantly improve CPU and
memory utilization rates. In addition, EMC’s vision is also in line with its commitment
to the Virtual Computing Environment Company’s (VCE) Vblock™ vision for building
integrated infrastructures for virtualization at scale, and EMC IT has deployed this
solution as its standard within its new “virtual-only” data center.
2. Optimized storage and backup/recovery
EMC IT has moved from a two-tier storage model to a five-tier configuration and has
also increased the utilization of its storage infrastructure by 19 percent by leveraging
EMC’s comprehensive product portfolio and applying the guiding principles of
information lifecycle management (ILM) and operational best practices.
EMC expects to further increase its storage utilization rate from 68 percent to 80
percent, thereby avoiding the purchase of more than 1.5 petabytes of storage over
five years with a goal of 100 percent virtualized storage by 2012. EMC IT is working
on further optimizing information storage for a private cloud environment with
technologies such as Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), Virtual Provisioning,
and tiering, consolidation. EMC IT classifies information based on its criticality to
the business. EMC VPLEX™ is a key enabling technology that will enable EMC IT to
virtualize and move workloads and associated information around data centers, and
across internal and external clouds.
In terms of backup and recovery, EMC IT needed to facilitate complete and highly
effective information management from a virtual cloud-based infrastructure. In
addition, data deduplication capabilities were employed to increase the efficiency of
EMC’s growing backup-to-disk policy. Key benefits include: reducing overall backup
by 50 percent; decreasing backup time by 75 percent; backing up remote users using
Avamar® data deduplication capabilities; and increasing remote backup and recovery
success rates from 38 percent to 98 percent. EMC IT has satisfied its storage
management optimization techniques using best-in-class EMC solutions such as Data
Domain®, Avamar®, and NetWorker® for replication, backup, recovery, and archiving.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 17
18. 3. Security
EMC’s private cloud vision involves the ability for IT managers to securely federate
data and resources across internal and external clouds. Therefore, it is critical to
enhance security to: support multi-tenancy; data leakage protection; governance,
risk, and compliance (GRC); and carrier security requirements. EMC IT collaborates
with as the RSA Security division to virtualize security components and develop
governance, risk, and compliance tools to monitor and manage the challenges related
to transitioning IT to a private cloud-based infrastructure. Currently, identity
management is enabled through RSA Access Manager and Federated Authentication
Manager, and RSA SecurID® is used for two-factor authentication. Central
infrastructure configuration and patch management is provided through EMC Ionix™
Server Configuration Manager (SCM). Security capabilities such as RSA enVision®—a
security and information event management platform—and Archer’s GRC software
provide a common point of management and control to address GRC requirements.
4. Management and automation
As physical technology migrates to virtual technology, the ability to track, measure,
monitor, and manage becomes more complex. As private cloud-based IT management
becomes a reality, it is imperative to track IT resources and information using an
integrated tool suite. EMC IT is working on solutions to accelerate self-provisioning of
IT services, reduce time-to-market, and support innovative chargeback models. EMC
IT has chosen toolsets from EMC’s Ionix suite of IT management software that provide
a single-pane-of-glass view of all of the IT resources across the virtualized data
center, using the advanced integrated IT management capabilities of tools such as
Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) and SCM, and virtualization management
tools such as VMware vCenter™ and VMware vCloud™.
5. Applications and cloud experience
EMC’s vision for the virtualized data center and the transition to the private cloud is to
enable its IT organization to offer platforms and applications as services (for example,
IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS). First and foremost, EMC IT has been on the path to providing
database grids on Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server to enable virtualized functionality
and provide slices of these databases with agility to business units (also known as
Database as a Service). EMC Greenplum® is now being used to support an efficient
scale-out data warehousing and a sandbox-based analytics service offering (also
called BI as a Service).
EMC IT has also moved application servers and middleware to a virtualized platform
with the goal of providing on-demand infrastructure services to business units for their
development activities. The application development and middleware capabilities have
been standardized on the VMWare vFabric platform, including the Spring framework,
Spring Integration, Spring Batch, and Gemfire. EMC IT is also enabling an application
infrastructure based on VMware’s products such as vFabric App Director and Cloud
Foundry to provide IT in a self-service model to its business units.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 18
19. The organization also views the cloud model as an agile mechanism to support the
movement of current business-supported applications into a controlled, secure, and
protected IT-supported model. This will enable the business to focus more on their
business priorities and IT to better enable the business.
Virtual desktop infrastructure—an implementation use case
Using the power of VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), EMC is working on
desktop virtualization approaches to simplify and lower the cost of IT management,
increase IT security, optimize information storage, and provision IT resources based
on the needs, requirements, and profiles of its workers. EMC IT’s goal is to provision
the user and not the device, hence the implementation of VDI will provide the ability
for IT to enable different devices used by the end user. This would include the usual
company-issued desktop or laptop but extend to a bring-your-own-technology (BYOT
but better known as BYOPC or BYOD) model in addition to thin clients and mobile
devices.
EMC plans to have 100 percent virtualized desktops by 2012, resulting in improved
and simplified security, lower client TCO, rapid deployment, reduced support costs,
and user-based provisioning.
MAKING THE TRANSITION TO THE PRIVATE CLOUD
Before transitioning existing IT resources to a private cloud-based infrastructure, EMC
IT performs the following key activities.
Ensure basic enabling technologies work
The first activity is to ensure that the basic enabling technologies work, as advertised,
in EMC’s own IT environment. This requires rigorous testing of all infrastructure
components within the virtualized data center—compute, storage, network, and
orchestration—to ensure that their performance is in line with requirements and
established benchmarks. Next, EMC IT configures and tests all software components
for the required performance levels. During this phase, it is critical to focus on
security requirements and issues relating to federation between locations.
Create use cases and assess capabilities across requirements
The second general activity involves creating a high-level framework of use cases
within the business and assessing the current capabilities across those
requirements. The objective of identifying the use cases is to match the business
needs to the appropriate cloud model for providing IT services. The high-level use
cases are based on parameters such as time-to-market, demand predictability and
IT elasticity, integration needs, network bandwidth and latency, security, risk and
compliance, and business impact. The requirements across each of these parameters
are dynamic and vary significantly across applications, affecting the choice of internal
and external cloud resources required.
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20. Define policy and governance mechanisms
The third activity is to define policy and governance mechanisms to manage and
operate the private cloud-enabled IT organization. It is essential to define robust
mechanisms to handle critical issues around technical characteristics such as
security, bandwidth, and integration, followed by performance, which encompasses
service delivery aspects such as IT management.
EMC IT’s private cloud policy and governance framework
The transition of IT to the private cloud directly impacts the profits, operational and
business costs, and risks faced by the organization, as follows:
• Impact to revenue—The transition to the private cloud helps IT organizations
provide improved services to business units. These IT services help business units
find new customers, enhance quality while lowering the cost of goods and
services delivered, and sell more successfully to existing customers.
• Impact to costs—Transitioning the entire IT infrastructure to the private cloud
calls for large organizational investments upfront, resulting in significant savings
at the end of the transition. Therefore, it is essential to make adequate budgetary
provisions initially to reap rewards later.
• Impact to risks—A private cloud infrastructure uses both internal and external
cloud infrastructures. This calls for new approaches to manage the business and
information risks for the organization.
Therefore, it is essential to establish a governance body (involving people from
business, finance, legal, and IT disciplines from within the company) for evaluating
the migration of IT to a private cloud-based infrastructure.
EMC IT has developed a high-level policy and governance framework to move
applications, platforms, and infrastructures to the external and public cloud. EMC
has defined criteria that decide the policies and governance frameworks for an
application:
• Application classification—Classifying applications as mission-critical
(directly affecting customer service delivery, or affecting EMC’s revenue or its
reputation), business-critical (critical to the operations of a business unit), or
business supporting (a supporting application)
• Security—The information security requirements necessary for the application
• Risk and compliance—A profile of the risks of incidents, from outages to
information leaks, and the required compliance requirements
• Connectivity—Bandwidth and performance requirements for globally distributed
applications and users
• Integration—The requirements to ensure that tightly coupled applications can
work together
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21. • Performance—Service delivery requirements such as availability, service level
agreements, and IT service management
• Time-to-market—Rapid provisioning requirements
• Demand elasticity—Ability to deal with changes in the requirements of
business units, as well as scale-up and scale-down needs
EMC IT has created a set of business use cases, such as those in Figure 8 for various
profiles of services requested by business units with policies and small-scale
governance functions for each use case.
The transition to the hybrid cloud will enable EMC IT with a transparent method for
tracking the usage of IT resources by business unit. This empowers EMC IT with the
capability of constructing new chargeback models.
Figure 8. A high-level abstraction of EMC IT's policy and governance model for public
cloud usage
The Enterprise Strategy Group has published a white paper called ESG IT Audit:
EMC’s Journey to the Private Cloud, which examines EMC IT’s journey to date.
Looking forward, EMC expects to increase the storage utilization rate from 68
percent to 80 percent and avoid the purchase of more than 1.5 petabytes of storage
over five years.
All told, EMC’s journey from 2004 through 2009 resulted in savings of $104.5
million, including an estimated $88.3 million in capital equipment cost avoidance
and $16.2 million of operating cost reduction due to increased data center power,
cooling, and space efficiency. These savings have since gone past $125 million,
when including 2009 and 2010
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 21
22. CONCLUSION
EMC’s cloud computing strategy is designed to completely transform its IT
organization and operations. Such a transformation means getting ready and making
changes in the way IT is built, run, consumed, and governed at the company. The goal
of this strategic initiative is to make EMC IT a customer-centric provider of end-to-end
IT solutions to meet the business needs of EMC business units.
Leveraging the power of the private cloud, EMC IT is introducing innovative services
such as on-demand IT infrastructure provisioning and self-service options for IT
service enablement. To facilitate this transition, EMC IT has concentrated its efforts on
the definition of a clear strategy for internal cloud and programs that focus on
transitioning its IT infrastructure to the virtualized data center model. This initiative is
in line with EMC’s vision for a virtualized computing environment, which it shares with
its partners VMware and Cisco.
To prepare the organization for a new paradigm of IT operations, EMC IT is also
educating stakeholders at various levels on the new IT service paradigms, as well as
developing a strong policy and governance framework for managing the new IT
infrastructure. Working closely with partners and product divisions, EMC IT is
concentrating on maximizing the business benefits of technology that can move its
existing IT infrastructure to the private cloud.
EMC’s structured approach helps accelerate its journey to the private cloud. It
provides the company with the opportunity to start realizing the benefits of cloud
practices now without waiting for complete solutions to emerge even as it moves from
the Business Production phase to the IT as a Service phase. This enables EMC IT to
more easily leverage these solutions as technologies evolve.
By having “risk versus reward” conversations with stakeholders at each level, EMC IT
has been successful in accelerating the adoption of private cloud-based technologies
within the company. This approach enables EMC to better structure discussions with
partners and external IT cloud service providers. EMC IT can also provide vendors with
the granular details of candidate workloads and the solution requirements they seek.
Overall, EMC IT has been able to put together and leverage a better, more efficient
and more agile ecosystem based on its cloud computing strategy.
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 22
23. References
Read the following for more information:
www.emc.com/EMCITProven
EMC IT’s Journey to the Private Cloud blog at http://www.EMC.com/EMCit
EMT IT’s Journey to the Private Cloud white paper series. Topics include:
Backup and Recovery
Applications and Cloud Experience
Virtual Desktop
Server Virtualization
ESG IT Audit: EMC’s Journey to the Private Cloud ESG white paper
The following can be found on Chuck’s Blog, an EMC insider’s perspective on
information, technology, and customer challenges:
“Not All Clouds Are Private Clouds”
“Private Clouds and the Fixed Vs. Variable Discussion”
“Private Cloud – The TOS Model”
“Private Cloud Adoption Models”
“Good Governance Equals Good IT?”
Announcement of the VCE coalition
Vblock Infrastructure Packages
EMC IT, A Blueprint for Data Center Efficiency white paper
Learn more about these EMC offerings on EMC.com:
EMC Atmos
EMC Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning
EMC FAST
EMC Ionix
VCE Cloud Computing Strategy Service
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 23
24. CONTACT US
To learn how EMC products, services, and solutions can help solve your business and
IT challenges, contact your local representative or authorized reseller—or visit us at
www.EMC.com.
EMC Corporation
Hopkinton, Mass. 01748-9103
1-508-435-1000 (in North America 1-866-464-7381)
EMC IT’S JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE 24