supply enterprise customers with modular building blocks for private clouds. Logically enough, these “VBlocks” include storage hardware from EMC, virtualization software from VMware, and a networking fabric from Cisco.
One advantage of the VCE architecture, Feinberg says, is that it will allow companies that use it to federate more easily with outside cloud services that are installing the same architecture. “The VCE Coalition is really about taking existing data centers and making them much more efficient,” he says. “Not only is their own physical environment virtualized but they’ll be able to take advantage of the same capabilities in a service provider.”
In fact, Feinberg thinks that hybrid IT infrastructures will become fairly common, with many companies building their own internal clouds but also tapping outside public clouds occasionally, when it’s more economical or when security concerns aren’t paramount. He expects some EMC customers, for example, will buy the Atmos software even as they subscribe to Atmos Online. He argues that federation around common technology standards is the quickest, easiest way to allow this kind of flexibility (and, of course, he’d like the common standards in this case to be EMC’s).
“Other industries have figured out how to do this,” Feinberg argues. “I can fly from Boston to Bangalore on a United ticket, but the plane might be Lufthansa’s. I can go to London and use my cell phone on the O2 network, but it still shows up on my AT&T bill.” While the big cloud service providers like Amazon haven’t yet shown much inclination to make it easier for their customers to take their business elsewhere, Feinberg claims that “a number of service providers” are already talking with EMC about federating around Atmos.
“EMC’s plan is to be the provider of technologies to these companies to enable this,” he says. “We will be an on-ramp for other service providers. Yes, you can put some data in Atmos Online, but the reality is that there are a lot of great service providers out there, and ours is a product development company, and there will always be other [cloud providers] who have greater scale and focus. Our focus, frankly, is to get the rest of the ecosystem up and running. The game plan is called ‘Intel Inside.'”
