EMC Federation adds to hybrid cloud portfolio

The EMC Federation, including the newly acquired Virtustream, has announced new innovations across its hybrid cloud portfolio. The EMC Federation provides customers with a common platform for the management of multiple clouds and multiple cloud service providers as one logical cloud. eliminating the distinction between on-premises and off-premises workloads.

Virtustream helps enterprises around the world migrate, run and manage their I/O-intensive, mission-critical applications in the cloud. Its solutions have been deployed in production environments more than 200 SAP solutions, including in one of the first implementations of the SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA) in the cloud. 

Virtustream forms the foundation of the EMC Federation’s new managed cloud services business, led by CEO Rodney Rogers. Virtustream will announce its plans, which will include leveraging other EMC Federation capabilities, in Q4.

The EMC Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution delivers a private cloud with on-ramps to public cloud services; Virtustream provides a managed cloud service for mission-critical applications; and VMware vCloud Air is the public cloud offering. While quite distinct today, many of the underlying technologies from these offerings will be integrated in future. For example, VMware hybrid networking capabilities will be integrated into future versions of the Virtustream xStream Cloud Management Platform.

The announcements detail new capabilities across the Federation:

• VMware has enhanced its vCloud Air Disaster Recovery Services. Disaster Recovery OnDemand will add a pay-for-what-you-consume pricing option, and Site Recovery Manager Air is a new software-as-a-service offering that will provide a comprehensive management solution for designing, testing, executing and orchestrating centralised business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

• VMware vCloud Air Object Storage, powered by EMC, is a portfolio of storage services for unstructured data. This will be integrated into VMware vCloud Air OnDemand Platform.

• A preview of updates to the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution, featuring best-in-class technologies from EMC Federation companies. Also announced were a new “Federation Ready” partner credential programme and a new Federation End-User Computing Solution.

• VCE has expanded VxRack, its hyperconverged rackscale system, with a new offering based on VMware software. This new persona of VxRack enables IT organisations to quickly and cost effectively deploy hybrid cloud infrastructure based on a VMware software-defined architecture.