EMC plays strategic role in helping customers virtualise environments

Information infrastructure solutions leader EMC is committed to helping its customers leverage solutions to build out their fully virtualised environments - hence its participation in the VCE (VMware, Cisco, EMC) partnership.

Gerhard van der Merwe, EMC's Regional Country Manager: South Africa, South East and Central Africa, says: “We aim to do this with solutions which fully integrate into, extend and accelerate our customers' journey towards creating an internal cloud, which in turns creates the onramp to private cloud. This is where EMC has the largest number of integrations with VMware across our core portfolio.”

The strategic alliance between the three market leaders centres on a shared vision for cloud computing. The objective is to combine the reliability, security and control of the data centre with the flexibility, scalability and on-demand computing of a cloud environment.

EMC is developing and enhancing its core technologies to integrate with VMware and Cisco solutions with a view to creating a scale-out operate, compute, network, and storage environment.

“It is important to underscore that EMC brings much more to the table than storage. There are three other, very important, disciplines that customers are asking for: information management, resource management, and security,” Van der Merwe says.

Chris Norton, Regional Director for VMware South Africa, says: “The alliance is taking three best-of-breed technologies and creating reference architectures for customers to build their data centres in conjunction with the frameworks that we have put forward. It will make a significant difference to the way people compute. It changes the rules and the way people think about their environment.

“Instead of a siloed infrastructure, we're starting to bring together networking, storage and virtualisation environments into a single strategic platform. We need tightly aligned systems integrators like Dimension Data to deliver - because vision without execution is hallucination."

Craig Hockley, General Manager of Data Centre Solutions at Dimension Data South Africa, says existing data centres are too complex.

"They have been constructed using an almost accidental architecture. Applications and the systems to run them have been procured and installed as needed, instead of fitting into an architectural plan," he says. "But virtualisation is creating a shift in how customers think about data centre architecture, because it's a very different way of delivering resources to applications. As a systems integrator, it's going to present lots of opportunities in the market, because there will be a change in how data centres are built in the future. And not just for data centres, but in networking, facilities, infrastructure, right up to the applications.

“We are excited about the relationship between Cisco, EMC and VMware because they have created a broad architectural blueprint for customers to build out a next-generation data centre. We also see this as a major opportunity to reinvent how IT services are delivered to the market and dramatically improve that delivery at the same time. "Van der Merwe believes there is a unique opportunity for enterprises to jump ahead of their competitors.

"We want to become a lot more strategic with our clients and our partners so we will be rated as more than just a vendor," he says. "There is an ideal opportunity with this alliance to take advantage of the lead we have in the marketplace. To talk to our clients about IT, applications and networking has been very difficult up until now. The consequence of having this integrated approach is that we are starting to have conversations with groups of people at clients who represent more of their infrastructure and their applications at the business level. Because of this, we can leapfrog competitors time-wise.

“All three vendors are meeting regularly and creating opportunities for clients to discuss where they want to go. I've been in IT for a long time and I've never seen this level of collaboration.

"The other advantage of deploying VCE is that applications do not have to be rewritten. Other methods of deploying applications to the cloud require rewrites and, therefore, lots of organisations are reluctant to do so. Our strategic software partners appreciate the business benefit of knowing that their customers' software investments are protected."