EMC ‘Doubles Down’ on OpenStack

This Pulse blog post was originally published on November 4, 2014.

EMC “Doubles Down” on OpenStack

By Dorian Naveh, senior director technology alliances, EMC Corporationwww.emc.com
    
EMC is paving the way to the 3rd Platform of computing by focusing on the growing momentum in the OpenStack market.

Recently IDC projected that by 2020, 3rd platform applications will be driving nearly 100% of IT growth, with many new workloads running on and leveraging Open Source technologies. As a result, we are seeing tremendous growth in OpenStack occurring in the Private and Hybrid cloud spaces. There are several reasons for this including tangible customer benefits like flexibility, modularity, and reduced costs – all backed by a broad community.

EMC is committed to helping customers with their OpenStack deployments and is increasing investments in OpenStack through two exciting new offerings – an OpenStack Reference Architecture Program and an EMC Enterprise Hybrid cloud OpenStack Edition.

The OpenStack Edition of EMC Enterprise Hybrid cloud is extending to the OpenStack market EMC’s longstanding tenet of providing choice to customers by enabling them to build Hybrid Clouds on VMware vCloud, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack-based solutions.

The OpenStack Reference Architecture Program will facilitate the deployment and operation of OpenStack Clouds by providing customers with tested, qualified products and validated reference architectures. These offerings will be supported by a suite of professional services and backed by cooperative support agreements with key OpenStack partners.

EMC is collaborating closely with leading OpenStack vendors Ubuntu, supported by Canonical, Mirantis and Red Hat to release certified and validated architectures complemented by recommended best practices and deployment tool blueprints.

Underlying these deliverables will be joint integration efforts with our partners’ management and deployment tools. This will simplify the installation of our joint technologies and will provide customers benefits like deep storage insight, visibility into event monitoring, and infrastructure operations – making it easier to consume cloud resources.

EMC will continue to expand this program into 2015 with other partners including: VMware and other members of the OpenStack partner ecosystem.

Over the past few years, EMC has embraced OpenStack through contributions to the community, active participation in the OpenStack Foundation, and working closely with our customers who are deploying and operating OpenStack clouds. This year, EMC has accelerated our community participation through increased Cinder development and contributions to the Juno release, which includes feature-rich plug-ins for VMAX, VNX, ViPR, XtremIO, and ScaleIO. We also are working on a new project that was incubated in Juno named Manila, which we believe will be well received by the user community.