By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
May 26, 2010

SINGAPORE – The data is enormous, but the budget to contain it is measly. This is the proverbial IT dilemma that information infrastructure vendor EMC hopes to address with its ramped-up private cloud offering, taking off from its successes in the virtualization space.

Speaking before reporters from various Southeast Asian countries here at EMC’s annual media summit, top executives from the company said the journey to the private cloud has begun here and now.

“The current [data center] environment is complex, inefficient, inflexible, and costly, with several siloes of applications,” explained Ron Goh, president, EMC Southeast Asia.

This calls for a need to better manage information, which, according to an EMC/IDC study on The Digital Universe, is pegged at 0.8 zettabytes in 2009, growing by a factor of 44 to balloon to 35.2 zettabytes by 2020.

A Zettabyte is a unit of measure for information which is equivalent to a million, million gigabytes, or a number with 21 trailing zeroes.

“Currently, 72% of the IT budget is spent on just maintaining current systems,” Goh shared. “Only 28% are devoted to developing new areas and incremental growth.”

Goh said companies know that information is growing, but would like to keep more of them coming in than taking off. “[With the enormous data growth], CIOs need to think what [the environment] is going to be in the next five years, and account it in designing their infrastructure and roadmap,” he added.

Leveraging cloud computing—especially private cloud—will prove to be an essential measure to curb—or at least prevent—the data growth.

Journeying to the cloud
Private cloud is the next natural step in the evolution of computing, according to Jeff Nick, chief technology officer, EMC. From mainframes, corporations moved on to client/server setups, then to the Web, and now, the cloud.

“Virtualization has been the driving force behind this transformation,” Nick explained, “as well as the coming of very powerful processors.”

Today’s data center, according to EMC’s CTO, is an environment of trust, control, reliability, and security, but is composed of multiple incompatible architectures that is difficult to manage.

The promise of the cloud, on the other hand, is to provide dynamic, cost-efficient, on-demand, and flexible data centers. “Private cloud is about taking the capabilities that [public cloud] service providers have built into the architecture, and unleashing that to the customers inside the organization,” Nick related.

The basic step in building the cloud, however, is through virtualization. “With virtualization, [IT departments] break down siloes to unify and create a ubiquitous infrastructure where resources can be pooled together,” Nick said.

Business drivers, such as the recent financial crisis and the massive explosion of data, also push companies to consider the cloud, in order to avoid what Nick calls the “perfect storm,” where “[companies] are buried in data, but they still need to manage, secure, and audit them, all with constrained and non-growing budget.”

Through such mechanisms, Nick said private cloud vendors can deliver unprecedented levels of business continuity.

Moving data centers
EMC, in fact, just recently debuted during EMC World a new technology which gives firms “unlimited scalability” and virtually 24/7 uptime through its VPLEX offering, a next-generation storage virtualization system which enables organizations to move data centers across various geographies. EMC candidly calls the technology “[your] data teleporter.”

EMC’s VPLEX offering features an advanced data cache which allots resources in order to feed repeated application workloads. It also features an active/active sharing mode, which creates real virtual environments across physical boundaries.

VPLEX comes in four flavors, but only two of them have been released so far. VPLEX Local enables movement of capacities within the data center, while VPLEX Metro does this across two data centers, spanning 100 kilometers of distance.

Soon to be released are VPLEX Geo and VPLEX Global, which allows resource sharing for thousands of kilometers and multi-site data centers across the globe, respectively, all contributing to the creation of a seamless working environment wherever the infrastructure may be around the globe.

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