As part of the EMC Federation of businesses, EMC and VMware have teamed up to deliver the new Federation Software-Defined Data Center solution. EMC provides the storage platforms and data protection side of the solution and VMware provides the virtual infrastructure platform, management and automation. The powerful combined force of EMC Information Infrastructure (II), Pivotal, RSA and VMware, together invested in a Joint Engineering Lab for solution validation as well as unified customer service experience for single point of contact and accountability.
Today’s Federation Software-Defined Data Center announcement is focused on helping data centers fully virtualize. This goal well beyond servers — it’s about virtualizing everything from compute to network to storage, all managed with a common set of tools. The solution is about supporting traditional enterprise applications and operating them at the lowest possible cost. Combined with management and automation, it provides a starting point for deploying next-gen cloud applications that can help transform businesses so they stay competitive.
End-User Self-Service Portal
One of the most important features of the Federation Software-Defined Data Center Solution is the ability for end-users to provision services on their own through a portal with visibility into associated costs. It could be an individual virtual machine that costs the user $1.50 per week, or a complete application stack that leverages multiple virtual machines that costs $8.00 per week (database, application, web servers complete with storage). Both of these examples highlight numerous business benefits. It’s easy for the end-user to consume IT resources; there is transparency in IT pricing and costs; and everything being requested is delivered automatically without manual intervention increasing IT efficiency and agility.
Automated Monitoring
Another feature of the Federation Software-Defined Data Center Solution is real-time intelligence. Automated monitoring is essential because it helps IT make better infrastructure decisions. It ensures that not only are the most important elements of capacity, performance, and health monitored, but that alerts are issued intelligently. This reduces the “noise” of monitoring down to what’s truly important to maintaining uptime and service level agreements. Finally, automated monitoring also includes “one click’ root cause analysis of the entire infrastructure which makes managing your entire cloud infrastructure simple.
Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
Finally, let’s look at data protection and disaster recovery. Backup is included as early as the request of a virtual machine itself. In the virtual machine example mentioned above, if an end-user is requesting a VM, the protection level is selected at the time of request. Maybe it’s backed up for an entire year or for three years. It’s up to the end-user to decide. Protection can also be provided for self-provisioned applications for complete disaster recovery. Whether it’s predefined protection policies, end-user restores, or different DR protection levels for different applications, the Federation Software-Defined Data Center Solution is integrated to offer it all.
The above examples are just a few features that are delivered by the Federation Software-Defined Data Center Solution. They not only show the strength of the new solution and how it delivers a virtualized data center controlled entirely by software, but highlight how the EMC Federation of businesses combine technologies to help customers deliver ITaaS where IT is on demand, with total cost transparency, delivered on your cloud of choice.
For more information on the new Federation Software-Defined Data Center Solution, please visit www.emcfederation.com.
