Increasingly, organizations, small and large, are attempting to or at least considering to implement some type of cloud-based architecture into their IT infrastructure. The benefits of tight integration, intelligent abstraction of resources, seamless automation and orchestration are becoming quite apparent. These benefits and the desire to obtain them are causing customers and partners to look at vendors such as EMC for such a solution. Importantly, a solution that doesn’t require re-invention of the wheel or painstaking initial setup.
EMC has offered a variety of options in hardware, software and APIs to help these organizations with this need. To take it one step further, EMC offers a solution/reference architecture for the entire cloud–a cloud based on EMC and VMware offerings. Both hardware and software. Called the EMC Enterprise Private Cloud (EPC), EMC created a pre-built cloud-in-a-box that includes the how-to on configuring the software and hardware to enable this type of environment. Importantly, there are special EMC-developed integrations specifically leveraged by this solution that takes it above and beyond a normal reference architecture. Check out the announcement here:
https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-28790
So what are the key pieces of functionality in this solution? Well everything you’d expect; automated provisioning, self-service abilities, intelligent storage management, elasticity, intelligent and in-context monitoring, chargeback and backup and recovery. All of this is achieved by pre-tested and designed integration between a large variety of products. See the image below for the whole picture.
As you can see there is a whole lot going on. The cloud environment is essentially front-ended by VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) which is backed up vCOps, NSX, Log Insight, vCO (which we have introduced a variety of tailored workflows for) and ViPR. Storage provided by VNX or VMAX (or both!) and protected by EMC Backup and Recovery products like Avamar and Data Domain. For specific versioning and a full list check out the Simple Support Matrix here:
Of course all of the standard integrations what we know and love such as VSI, VASA and VAAI are inherent in the design as well.
The current design of the EPC offering supports three different sizes: small (1,000 VMs) medium (5,000 VMs) and large (10,000 VMs) to fit the scale need of a spectrum of customers.
The reference architecture offers a succinct overview of the entire solution while still providing excellent detail on what is included and what is needed and what can be done. The reference architecture can be found here:
For the full-detailed document, check out the solution guide which goes through all of the implementation and administration details concerned with the EPC.
Here are some demo videos to see the cloud at work:
I think this solution is rather in-depth and definitely worth at least a read as it is pretty cool. There are areas that can be improved and EMC is focused on doing so with each release. There is only so much time in a release cycle–remember this isn’t just plugging some hardware and software together–EMC is actually developing code to integrate these pieces as tightly as possible. If anything, you will come out of this document learning quite a bit about what EMC has to offer in the cloud and in VMware integration!