EMC World is one of my favorite times of the year – it’s a great opportunity to spend solid time with thousands of customers, partners, and fellow EMCers in one place.
It’s also the time of year in our calendar where we bring a lot of mojo to bear on the industry – all at once. In fact, there’s often SO much you can lose sight of the big picture.
If you want to see the trees…
… Check out posts on Unity, on Project Nitro, and many others as they light up this week. You’ll see facemelting updates on XtremIO, Isilon, ScaleIO, Data Domain, VMAX All Flash and much, much more.
These are “ingredients” for customers – things they build their own platforms from. They are “best of breed” building blocks for people who like to build, like to maintain, and work to optimize. And in each of the ingredients – you will see the Modern Datacenter Architectural pillars: Flash, Scale-out, Software-Defined, Cloud-Enabled – all wrapped in trust…. Well – they are well represented!
But I also want us to zoom out and see the forest..
… Then stop, breathe and look up – and look out.
The first “big picture” element that I see every day with every customer is an important recognition that things are changing. A recognition that they need to focus on where they differentiate and innovate versus their competitors. That means that while all the cool point innovations EMC launched at EMC World today are powerful – customers increasingly want to consume/buy the necessary outcome. Customers are less and less interested in building it themselves – even if optimizing the ingredients has some marginal benefit. This is being accelerated by the stark contrast of SaaS and Public Cloud models – which offer NO “best of breed” configurability, but in exchange deliver speed and agility.
The second “big picture” element is the emergence of the “Digital Enterprise” agenda in every customer. Every customer is realizing they need to digitize their business, build new ways of engaging with their customers with an “any time, any way, any scale” way. This creates huge pressure for customers to re-learn what it means to be a software company and innovate faster – versus simply using off-the shelf enterprise software.
That’s why I think two of the biggest announcements at EMC World are the new Native Hybrid Cloud platform and VxRack System 1000 updates (Neutrino Nodes joining SDDC Nodes and FLEX Nodes) - you'll see updates later this week.
Both are focused on this new Cloud Native world. Both are delivered in turnkey form, engineered stacks that are built holistically, supported holistically, and sustained holistically. They are platforms – not solutions. You don’t “assemble” them – you consume them.
Read more about VxRack Neutrino Nodes (link will go up soon!)
Read more about the Native Hybrid Cloud (link will go up soon!)
Look, EMC World is a mostly infrastructure-centric event, and most people attending are focused on infrastructure. But no one – I repeat – no one, consumes infrastructure for its own sake – even cool turnkey Cloud Native IaaS like VxRack System 1000 with Neutrino Nodes.
There’s always a higher-order thing – the application, the use case that consumes infrastructure. In the world of the digital enterprise – those would be new Cloud Native Applications – build in new ways, using new tools. The most popular tool to do that is Cloud Foundry, and the best Cloud Foundry distribution is Pivotal Cloud Foundry. What developers want is to get going faster; to code and innovate faster; to worry about infrastructure less. The Native Hybrid Cloud does that – it’s a turnkey developer’s stack that makes getting going with Pivotal Cloud Foundry faster:
- 93% faster time to code compared to building it yourself.
- Once up and running, developers move from idea to production 77% faster.
But – the Native Hybrid Cloud does more than help the developer – it helps the other half of the DevOps cultural and operational model – the IT Operations team. Normally IT operations is the enemy of the Developers – but the Native Hybrid Cloud makes them a hero again with control, reporting, chargeback and programmatic API-driven elastic infrastructure that the Developers building new Cloud Native apps need. Oh – and save money at the same time – NHC on VxRack System 1000 with Neutrino and FLEX Nodes helps the infrastructure become invisible and more efficient – up to 10x more efficient in both capex and opex.
The Native Hybrid Cloud joins the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud as EMC’s two “highest order” platforms – these are things for customers to consume versus build.
EHC ad NHC are both are designed to be hybrids – deploying on-premises, and leveraging off-premises clouds like Virtustream, AWS, Azure, and the vCloud Air Network.
- Enterprise Hybrid Cloud optimizes for traditional IT-as-a-Service, and is commonly deployed on Vblocks – and it optimizes around traditional IT needs: deep resilience, infrastructure availability, backup, DR and more. You can absolutely deploy Pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (many do!) for “one stack for traditional and cloud native”, but it is optimized to service traditional enterprise application workloads.
- Native Hybrid Cloud optimizes for Cloud Native PaaS and new applications, and is deployed on VxRack System 1000 with Neutrino Nodes (leveraging OpenStack and soon the VMware Photon Platform). Native Hybrid Cloud can also deploy VxRack System 1000 using Flex Nodes for customers who want to leverage vSphere).
Both EHC and NHC represent the fact that the march towards the IT endgame continues:
- Know thyself – choose to consume turnkey platforms and infrastructure vs. building and trying to optimize from best of breed ingredients.
- Use that insight to get smart about what businesses you are in and which you’re not in – and use that insight to focusing where (and how) you as a customer innovate faster.
Its’ a fascinating time to be in our industry, and a fascinating time to be a technologist! To all – enjoy EMC World, grab me and say hello, and if you’re so disposed, curl up with your favorite RSS reader, I’ve got a lot of posts coming
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