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The emerging pillars of IaaS - Andrew Thomas Feb 2012

Cloud computing and big data is quickly becoming disruptive infrastructure technology, causing enterprises to rethink and transform
their IT services. Some IT vendors are also diverting from their core business into cloud services providers - and in doing so,
competing with their customers.
With the consumerisation of IT, users regard themselves as IT experts, demanding access to both public and private cloud services
via BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) - iPods, Blackberrys, Laptops etc - and may be empowered to use alternatives to their IT
departments for new applications and services.
To meet these demands and to support cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) distinct categories or "pillars" of supporting services,
procurement , technology and expertise are emerging. Each service may be containerised with clear boundaries, and offered as a
private or public cloud services with self-service portals. These pillars are changing the economics of IT, with choices between capex
and opex, open and proprietary, off or on premise, metered or PAYG (pay as you grow) procurement.
EMC strategy is to develop and offer the technologies, products and services needed to deliver and manage the IT infrastructure as
an entity, providing the key IaaS technologies and products related to information management, content and storage throughout the
virtualization lifecycle - from application development, test and production, scaleout, migration, modernisation, through to retirement
and deletion.
The pillars to support IaaS that in turn
support PaaS and SaaS are therefore
categorised as:
1.

Network The cloud enabler of


reliable high bandwidth network
services, encompasses new
technologies of converged (IP &
FC) networks, traffic management
and optimisation to cater for
multimedia delivery and distribution
of services for collaboration and
workload balancing.

2.

Management - A new category of


cloud IT service management,
offering self provisioning portals,
automated workflow management
and orchestration that minimises
the need for specialised skilled
manual intervention

There are new emerging APIs and standards for the management of IaaS networking, compute & storage for ITIL
structured services, user service catalogues, self-service portals, chargeback, automated provisioning, workload
orchestration and capacity management for billing and PAYG (Pay As You Grow) procurement.

Security and trust are essential pre-requisites for cloud services and enabled by security technology embedded in each
pillar, such as Identity, Access, Key management and Encryption. Security can also be offered via cloud services.

3. Compute The Compute stack typically includes the capability for High Availability (HA), workload balancing and workload
mobility, with automated creation and provisioning of Virtual Machines, integrated with virtual application and desktop deployment
services to BYOD users. This pillar has distinct components as follows:
Hypervisor software (VMware,Hyper-V, Xen [Citrix, Oracle OVM), AIX, Solaris etc) with FC multi-pathing supporting multiple
VM O/S and API's for agentless discovery, management (WMI, SNMP etc) and automated provisioning.
Physical servers single machines or groups of blade servers with remote management capabilities.
Compute-attached storage (FC with NPIV, SCSI block) for boot and primary data. New technology includes thin provisioning
and storage tiering across EFD, FC, SATA & SAS storage modules, data de-duplication, with API's to the management stack
for automated provisioning and to offload compute intensive tasks, such as the creation of local and remote replicas, and
data mobility across storage arrays. Compute dedicated NFS storage can also be used for VM data stores with VAAI
integration.
4. Backup/Restore - Backup and restore for compute - operating environments, databases and file services. The new backup
technology features data de-duplication from the backup clients, that can stream changed data to specialised backup storage devices,
also featuring data de-duplication, automated archive of backup cycles, and replication to other devices off-site, eliminating traditional
tape.
5. File & Archive - This can comprise two distinct categories of shared storage, accessible via an IP network.

Shared NAS (File) storage supporting CIFS and NFS protocol with snaps, replication, and de-duplication.
Object Storage repositories for web-accessable multimedia content and archived data, accessed via object storage APIs. This
is a new category (OSD) of storage for multi-tenant web accessability and for long-term retention of static data.

Automated archiving can greatly reduce growth-related increases in compute resources and storage capacity, file storage and backup
resources, while supporting relentless data growth at the lowest TCO.
The Archive may use a shared repository, consisting of two or more geographically dispersed storage appliances, directly accessed
by applications and BYOD drop box clients using object storage API's, SDKs and XAM, with data automatically archived, retained or
deleted according to Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) policies.
6. Analyse This covers content management and data analytics to support business intelligence, with data searching and
extraction from both structured and unstructured private and public data to a separate and especially optimised compute and storage
repositories. A new emerging term is the intelligent information fabric.

Features the use of optimised hardware compute appliances with large storage capacities.
There is a new area of expertise with legal eDiscovery, data sciences and analytics and includes the provision of services for
data mining and "monte carlo" simulation.

EMC offerings- As well as being offered as


services or packages of related product
offerings, each pillar has also become a
specialist area of expertise with training courses
and industry recognised certification. EMC has
offerings of products, services, education and
certification for these pillars as follows:

Network - Connectrix, VPLEX and


RecoverPoint connectivity and IONIX
intelligent network management.
Management The Information
Management Group (IMG) of EMC offer
IONIX family supporting the complete pillar
with IT Orchestrator, ProSphere - with agent
less application and device discovery and
mapping. EMC RSA the security divison of
EMC - offerings including Identity, Access
and key Management , Security Event
Information Management (SEIM) and CTA.
EMC eServices includes Powerlink, Live Chat for product support, and Secure Remote Support Gateway (ESRS) for EMC
remote support.
Compute Storage FC attached Unified VNX and Symmetrix VMAX storage arrays, with Fully Automated Storage Tiering using
Virtualised storage Pools (FAST VP) across EFD, FC, SATA and SAS disk modules. An enhancement for compute storage is
VFcache using EFD within the server HBA's and integrated, with FAST VP.
Backup/Restore - Backup/Recovery Services (BRS) includes EMC Mozy service, Networker software with de-dupe clients,
Avamar or Data Domain de-dupe backup appliances, and EMC Disk Libary VTL for Open systems and mainframes .
File and Archive Unified Storage offers IP storage as Isilon OneFS scale-out NAS and ATMOS scalable object storage,
accessible via XAM API's , Source One software, and Cloud Tiering Appliance (CTA), Oxygen and Geodrive client for BYOD.
EMC partners such as Oxygen enable ATMOS to be deployed as user desktop or BYOD cloud storage service.
Analyse EMC Information Infrastructure Group (IIG) offers Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform (UAP), for structured and
unstructured data & Documentum Intelligent Information Platform (IIP). EMC offers Data Scientist certification.
EMC Consulting Offers cloud assessment, application & infrastructure design, modernisation and service virtualisation.

Virtual appliances (DTMF OVF) VM packages can be directly deployed on the Compute Hypervisor. EMC also offers products (such
as Atmos, CTA, IONIX, Avamar, Networker etc) as VMware Vapp virtual appliance packages, for simplified deployment on VMware
compute platforms, as an alternative to the hardware appliances.
VCE - a joint venture between VMware/Cisco/EMC/Intel offer complete off-the-shelf compute infrastructures with single-point
support, and customised for VDI, SAP, Microsoft Exchange, Financial Industry PCI compliance.
EMC offers IaaS and cloud services certification. EMC focuses on the information-related components of the pillars described above,
and together with technology leaders and stakeholders such as Intel (compute) VMware (hypervisor) and Cisco (network and server),
EMC is developing blueprint solutions and best practises for each of the pillars (Compute-, Storage-, Backup-, Analytics-, and
Desktop-as-a-Service) to provide and support the complete information, application and service virtualisation lifecycle.
Ref: NIST IaaS, PaaS, SaaS definitions of Cloud Computing SNIA DTMF

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