So I have been intrigued with a lot of cloud computing options and am continuously interesting in reading about what is unique and out there in this area. With the hundreds of ‘cloud’ offerings that are available out there I follow just a select few and was interested to read about EMC’s latest offering. I have for long been a EMC customer and worked with a range of their products and comprehensiveness of the technology platform.  The latest news is about the VMAX Cloud Edition that was announced at the VMware Partner Exchange event and it’s a self service access to Enterprise Class Storage. And there is nothing confidential about it.

It is designed to provide mission critical storage services for the public, hybrid, and private cloud. To get into the meat of this solution – they have a self service portal to provision and control storage. Each portal can manage 100Pb of usable capacity across 10 datacenters with 250,000 tenants. This should serve the needs of a lot of large service providers. Multi-tenancy is builtin so logical partitioning can be performed for each tenant and service levels can be changed on the fly to get the right fit.  EMC touts their latest offering in response to customer requirements and a detailed explanation is on Chad Sakac’s blog if you are interested. From my perspective the ability to catalog customer/application tiers (mission critical, database, it infrastructure, HPC) into a desired tier within the storage as a service platform is of great benefit. Firstly, you don’t have to worry about the RAID, storage pools, and what not but of bigger benefit is the turnaround time, ability to accelerate  deployment, and improve your service level.  For e.g. the Diamond tier is set for 1-4ms response times for 3.0IOPS/Gb whereas Bronze tier offers 10-40ms response time with 0.05IOPS/Gb. Data Protection through the use of Time Finder is also of great help because full copies or snaps can be made to protect data at storage level. The product features also include Tenant level metering and chargeback reports prepackaged and available right off the bat. What I am not too sure about and do not like really is the performance related reporting capabilities of various EMC arrays. I am hoping that with a storage as a service platform performance would never be a problem so reporting would not matter that much. Especially, because there is a service level tied with this offering so performance should be as expected.

During blogger briefing EMC also highlighted the availability of Rest API’s to integrate with existing operations and orchestration. I am sure many organizations would use this feature to have seamless continuance of their operational activities and have automated actions associated with them.

Other stuff I would wait for and learn about –

1) How would the Cloud storage environment being offered replicate with a global disaster recovery architecture that apply to many organizations

2) The capability to seamlessly migrate data from internal private cloud to EMC cloud service

3) The ability to use internal tools (that may or may not be API friendly) to work with the cloud service.

I am hopeful and positive that these questions might have been addressed but I will have to find out and that information will be for another post.