With each passing month, EMC gets better and better at understanding the unique requirements of service providers who provide various flavors of IT-as-a-service.
We still have a lot to do before we're arguably world class, but progress to date has been striking, and the pace seems to be increasing as well.
As we think about our "offer" for SPs and their clients, we're doing a good job of thinking beyond just products, and beginning to build out more services and programs.
That being said, a lot of what we offer SPs is built on our product technologies, since -- at our heart -- that's what EMC is all about.
In this post, I thought I'd offer up a whirlwind tour of the EMC product portfolio from a service provider perspective. If you're looking for an at-a-glance overview, here it is.
Well, maybe a very l-o-o-n-n-g glance.
To Begin With
A significant portion of EMC's portfolio is targeted at what I call "serious IT" -- enterprise IT shops that look beyond the hype and the buzz towards technologies and vendors they can partner with over the long haul.
This means our traditional customers want robust products that scale, deliver their services with a minimum of capex and opex, provide very rich functionality and are backed by a world class service and support organization.
Many of these characteristics are exactly what most SPs want. Indeed, if you're an SP targeting enterprise IT organization, they'll often want to know what products you use.
Storage
Can't get away from it -- that's what EMC is known for, despite the breadth of our current portfolio. That's OK -- storage is an important topic for enterprises, and it's an important topic for SPs as well. Not only can storage be a cost driver, it underpins so many services and capabilities that there's no getting away from the topic, it seems.
Symmetrix VMAX
The VMAX portfolio is currently the de-facto market standard for large-scale enterprise storage. Whether its the rock-solid availability, low-cost to serve at scale, or its non-disruptive management capabilities -- the same things that make it so popular for many enterprises also make it popular for so many SPs.
More demanding SP models appreciate the QoS and multitenant isolation, the enhanced security and the robust replication features. A rich set of APIs and CLIs enable support of all sorts of value-added integration with more sophisticated SP environments.
The recent addition of FAST (fully automated storage tiering) has dramatically changed the economics (and the performance) of storage; every SP should take note of the new capabilities because they're substantial.
If your SP model calls for supporting traditional IT workloads at non-trivial scale, you need to take a look at what a VMAX can do.
CLARiiON and Celerra Unified Storage
VMAX creates a very large pool of shared, protected and managed storage resources; CLARiiON and Celerra do the same thing, only with more modest and more modular rack-oriented pools. Some SP environments prefer physically isolated storage for their tenants using more of a co-lo model; these products fit well from a price/performance, availability and functionality perspective.
One exception is the Celerra gateways: some SPs use platforms like the new VG8 to provide absolutely stunning levels of performance and scalability using either CLARiiON and/or Symmetrix VMAX.
Both support FAST, both support various forms of compression and deduplication. Again, it's the new economics of storage at work, so SPs should take note.
Compared to the VMAX, this is a highly competitive part of the storage market; lots of choices for SPs to evaluate. That being said, these products generally fare well in SP bake-offs.
Atmos, Centera
If your SP model deals with an inordinate amount of relatively static content (i.e. files, documents, videos, emails, images, etc.), you're going to want to take a look at these purpose-built storage devices.
Although both can support traditional file systems, their real strength is when you use their native object models to capture and leverage metadata. Centera is a mature product, and still finds strong demand for managed repositories that are subject to formal compliance measures: email archives, health records and the like.
Atmos' strength is geography: multiple Atmos nodes working together to create the proverbial managed storage cloud with robust notions of policy and multi-tenancy. The cool things you can do with Atmos just aren't practical using more traditional storage approaches (like databases and file systems!).
If nothing else, you might want to be somewhat familiar with what these classes of storage platforms can do.
Yes, We Do Cheap And Cheerful
Most people think of EMC as making really big storage arrays. That's true, but we make small and cute ones as well, using many of same technologies in some cases.
Some SP models are all about hitting rock-bottom prices for their services. While that's often not attractive as a stand-alone business model, it can nicely complement more richer and functional SP offerings.
At the low end of the product line, we've got smaller CLARiiONs and Celerras, the AX product line -- as well as some larger Iomega products that have found a home in selected SP environments.
We're talking storage by the pallet here, folks ...
VPLEX
Storage professionals are starting to realize the power of what newer platforms like VPLEX can do in larger and more distributed environments, especially as seen in larger SP scenarios.
In a nutshell, VPLEX creates a dynamic pool of storage from multiple storage devices (EMC and otherwise) that enables non-disruptive workload mobility over progressively larger distances over time.
That results in a nifty approach to solving all sorts of thorny problems for enterprises and SPs alike: equipment migrations, rebalancing workloads against storage resources, moving workloads to different locations for performance or efficiency reasons, and the like.
There's also growing interest in using VPLEX to provide a "cloud bursting" capability where virtualized workloads federate not only amongst the SP's resources, but -- eventually -- between the enterprise IT organization and the service provider.
I'd encourage you to learn more about VPLEX and some of the interesting new scenarios it creates.
Storage Management
A variety of capabilities here, depending on what you're looking for. For SPs delivering traditional enterprise IT services, a lot of ControlCenter gets used. More than a few SPs have also integrated with underlying storage APIs and CLIs as well.
So much interest in using VMware for delivering SP services, and -- of course -- EMC probably does a better job of integrating storage with the VMware management stack than anyone these days, including the newer vCloud Director offerings using a variety of providers and plug-ins.
Finally, if you're interested in Vblocks (and you should be), the management platform of choice is the new version of EMC Ionix UIM (unified infrastructure manager) which orchestrates storage, server and network resources behind client-facing environments such as, say, VMware's new vCloud Director.
Backup, Restore and Replication
Data protection is not only a hot topic with SPs, it's one of EMC's core competencies. From mild to wild: there's something compelling in the portfolio for just about every SP we speak with.
In terms of SP business models, there are two distinct opportunities here which basically use the same infrastructure. One is providing progressively great degrees of protection for assets within the SP's data center and creating portals for tenants.
The other is offering "data protection as a service" for assets still located within traditional enterprise IT data centers.
In particular, the latter offering seems to be quite popular with SPs and their clients these days. SPs have an inherent advantage when it comes to data protection, simply because of their separation. And the advent of sophisticated compression and data deduplication make remote protection far more economically viable than just a year or so ago.
Avamar, Data Domain and Networker
All of these products use data deduplication to use an absolute minimum of resources -- they just do it differently.
Data Domain functions best as a backup dedupe target: information is backed up using existing methods, and aggressively squeezed before it's stored. Avamar, by comparison, does client-side deduplication of servers and desktops: it only sends an absolute minimal amount of information over the wire.
The desktop I'm writing this on is protected by Avamar -- it's about as seamless and unobstrusive as anything could be.
Avamar does an especially great job of integrating with VMware environments, and can be run entirely within VMs if needed without any requirement for dedicated hardware. That opens up all sorts of interesting potential SP offerings for virtual data center services that include data protection as a fully virtualized resource.
That doesn't mean that Data Domain isn't ideal for DP-as-a-service applications; quite the contrary. Plenty of traditional backup using existing backup processes out there that can benefit from Data Domain. And, don't forget, there are literally many thousands of DD customers out there who'd like to backup to an SP-provided centralized site, or quite often a second site using DD's remote replication capabilities.
EMC Networker (originally from Legato) continues to do well in the marketplace, especially for customers that want a traditional backup package that also supports all of the new, cool capabilities (like data deduplication).
Remote Replication
For decades, enterprises have turned to SPs for their disaster recovery / business continuity "second site". The key enabling technology here is remote replication: creating a synchronous, asynchronous or point-in-time recoverable data image at a remote site in case the unthinkable happens.
All EMC arrays support in-array replication: SRDF, MirrorView, Celerra Replicator et. al. And if a customer is running those products in their shop already, they'll be looking for an SP that supports what they've already got. SRDF, in particular, has a rather overwhelming customer footprint compared to other alternatives in the marketplace.
That being said, the array-based replication model is slowly moving to an appliance-based approach that's independent of the underlying storage. The leading offer in this space is EMC RecoverPoint, which provides an incredibly wide portfolio of adjustable and independent replication options (from simple to sophisticated) that aren't dependent on the underlying storage array.
Data Protection Management
The white-hot offering here is EMC Data Protection Advisor (DPA) that creates a "protection portal" largely independent of the underlying data protection technology -- traditional backup, data deduplication, replication, etc. More than a few SPs are currently using this product to put their tenants directly in control of their data protection monitoring and reporting.
Whether you're just looking for a better way to manage data protection for SP-owned assets, or you're interested in exposing services back to your clients -- DPA deserves a hard look.
Information Management
A bit broader than data protection, we use the phrase "information management" to describe the policy-based movement of information from one storage device (or location) to another.
Common use cases include archiving (files, emails), tiering of large storage farms, identification of information that requires special treatment (think compliance and security) or some other form of managed information handling.
Some of these capabilities are built into the array itself, such as EMC's FAST for block-oriented environments. Others do a good job of non-disruptively optimizing large file systems built on EMC's Celerra and other file serves, such as EMC's File Management Appliance, which now runs nicely in a virtual machine.
More interesting are the applications targeted at specific use cases, such as EMC SourceOne for email, SharePoint and file system environments: these generally have more powerful discovery, more workflow, more controls and more reporting than the generic equivalents.
Again, SPs are looking at these through twin lenses: more differentiated services for environments housed within an SP data center, and -- more importantly -- "as a service" for environments sitting in traditional IT data centers.
Once again, SPs have more than an economic advantage here -- their physical and logical separation from the IT data center provides additional measures of security and protection.
Perhaps the most specialized form of this is EMC SourceOne eDiscovery suite -- one of those large applications that just about every corporation wants (or, at least the legal department wants!) where it makes such blatant sense to provide it "as a service" rather than a traditional IT implementation.
Security, Security, Security
Security-oriented discussions with SPs are absolutely through the roof these days. Yes, of course every SP needs to answer the "security question" with their current and prospective tenants. But there's much more to it than that.
First, SPs can use modern security and GRC capabilities to differentiate their offerings in a crowded and noisy marketplace. Done right, SPs can offer a level of protection and assurance that most enterprise IT organizations can't begin match with internal resources.
More interestingly, the demand for "security as a service" is mushrooming: it's turning out to be one of those areas where more and more enterprise IT organizations are willing to turn to an external provider.
The lead EMC product up to now has been EMC enVision: a platform that gather, correlates and reports on all manner of security events generated across the landscape. However, the EMC/RSA Archer GRC management platform is now generating exceptionally strong interest from SPs as well.
Think of Archer as a high-level GRC dashboard: taking events from enVision and other environments, checking on various aspects of IT compliance (especially virtualized environments) and giving tenants that essential in-control capability that's so desireable.
Service Delivery Management
EMC's Ionix portfolio was formed around the initial acquisition of Smarts -- the de-facto standard for many network operators who need to manage end-to-end network service delivery. It goes without saying that any SP service is only as good as the underlying network; hence there's always a strong interest in sophisticated network service delivery management capabilities.
Over time, Smart's strengths in correlated root-cause analysis has been extended to other areas of the IT service delivery portfolio, creating today's EMC Ionix family.
A significant portion of the Ionix portfolio was acquired by VMware a while back (although still sold by EMC); these capabilities are now starting to become more fully integrated with VMware's SP-focused offerings, such as the new vCloud Director.
And, of course, if you've been tracking the interest in Vblock integrated infrastucture packages, you're probably aware that UIM (EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager) is part of the secret sauce that makes this next-gen model so appealing to large enterprises and SPs alike.
Documentum and The New IIG -- Information Intelligence Group
Documentum (and Captiva et. al.) are working progressively more with service providers.
At one end of the spectrum, there's strong interest for hosted Documentum services around content, collaboration and workflow. And at the other end of the spectrum, these technologies help power some very sophisticated vertical application services.
Although these are not entirely a mainstream play for most SPs, they do come up as an interesting portion of the EMC portfolio that we're working on with a few selected SPs.
Greenplum -- And The New EMC Data Computing Products Division
Our most recent acquisition -- Greenplum -- will be at the heart of a new product group at EMC.
Greenplum's preferred approach to data warehousing and business analytics (fully virtualized, self-service and on-demand) lends itself to all sorts of potentially SP-based models -- both vertical offerings as well as more generic as-a-service.
It's still early days, but I'm pretty sure this will be a part of our SP discussions before long :-)
Did I Forget Anything?
Lots of products in the EMC portfolio. I can keep most of them in my head, but occasionally forget a piece here or there. I'm sure I've done that here, so -- if I've forgetten something -- my apologies in advance.
As I mentioned at the outset, differentiated products are just the beginning of EMC's story for SPs. We still have a lot to cover -- there's services (from consulting to managed services to more traditional break-fix), SP-focused solutions (insert long and gorwing list here), relevant industry alliances (VCE, SAP, Microsoft, etc.), targeted programs, joint ventures -- there's certainly a lot to talk about.
The Strategic Piece
Unlike a few of our competitors, EMC is not in the outsourcing business. We're not standing up our own services on any significant level.
At our core, we're a product and technology company -- starting with storage, and moving outwards to many other disciplines, not least of them virtualization. As such, we're not inherently conflicted with regards to the new generation of SP business models.
We see the emergence of SPs as the inevitable consequence of the wholesale industry shift to cloud and IT-as-a-service model. It's a fundamental shift in IT buying patterns, and we're taking it very seriously.
Fortunately, we can bring a broad set of differentiated technologies to bear -- with more coming every quarter. If you'd like to cherry-pick through our portfolio, that's great. If you're interested in pre-integrated SP-oriented infrastructure (e.g. Vblock), so much the better.
Ideally, though, we'd like to get the opportunity to work with SPs across our entire portfolio -- much like we do our most valued enterprise customers.
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