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EMC Says Yes to Everything Cloud, Including OpenStack

Jodi Smith - November 04, 2014
- EMC

In its Hybrid Cloud announcement last week, EMC said it wants to simplify managing data, workloads and apps across private and public clouds. For now EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution runs on VMware, but EMC promises OpenStack support in 2015.

This is where Mirantis comes in. We’re collaborating with EMC to jointly develop reference architectures for integrating EMC storage and virtualization products with Mirantis OpenStack.

“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 (EHC) OpenStack Edition,” said EMC’s Dorian Naveh in a post on EMCPulse.

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, as well as integration with partners’ management and deployment tools, Naveh wrote. These efforts will be supported by professional services and backed by cooperative support agreements, he added. Canonical and Red Hat are also part of this first OpenStack wave, 

What EMC is doing is great news for OpenStack, as it enables customers with investments in non-OpenStack infrastructure and software to integrate OpenStack into their environments.

EMC’s Journey Into the OpenStack World

EMC, the enterprise storage giant, has been on a buying spree as it moves to embrace the open cloud. First, it acquired Cloudscaling, a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation, for its OpenStack-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for private and hybrid clouds. Just last week, it added Maginatics, also based on OpenStack, and Spanning Cloud Apps to its hybrid cloud arsenal. Maginatics, a Mirantis partner, offers is a cloud storage platform for managing distributed data on OpenStack, AWS, and other platforms, while Spanning Cloud Apps enables cloud application data backup and recovery. EMC’s Chad Sakac explains these acquisitions in a series of must-read blog posts, starting with this one, called Cloud Trifecta

Cloudscaling CEO and founder Randy Bias’ recent post about Cloudscaling becoming part of EMC’s “OpenStack Dream Team” is also worth a read. As he discusses the difference between legacy enterprise computing and cloud computing, he explains why EMC’s Emerging Technologies Division (ETD) is actually a good fit for Cloudscaling, along with other EMC seemingly contradictory acquisitions and technologies, like XtremIO (flash storage), ScaleIO (object storage), ViPR (software defined storage), and others. “What you will notice about ETD is that it is fundamentally about incubating and delivering new technologies that are potentially disruptive to the existing EMC product lines,” Bias wrote. “For these reasons, Cloudscaling finds itself in excellent company.”

EMC bought out most of Cisco’s stake in VCE recently. Originally, VCE was an alliance funded by EMC, Cisco, VMware, and Intel to develop cloud computing platforms. Back then, VCE stood for VMware-Cisco-EMC. VCE was later renamed the Virtual Computing Environment Company. Both EMC and VCE are corporate sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation.

In other EMC cloud-related moves, just two months ago, Pivotal (funded by EMC and VMware) hired Josh McKenty as field CTO for Cloud Foundry, the open source platform as a service (PaaS). It’s great to see EMC embracing and validating open cloud technologies and we look forward to helping customers adopt and transition to the open cloud.

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