EMC announces Native Hybrid Cloud

Issued by FCB Redline for EMC Southern Africa
EMC World, Las Vegas, 06 May 2016

Story highlights:

* Enables deployment of a cloud-native application developer platform and infrastructure services in as few as two days, rapidly available for developers to build, deploy and scale applications using Cloud Foundry.
* Integrates the Pivotal Cloud Foundry cloud-native platform with EMC and VMware's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and cloud-native offerings into a simple turnkey platform.
* Ideal for customers who have come to realise that integrating, supporting, and sustaining next-generation cloud-native stacks is non-trivial and drains resources that are better invested elsewhere.
* Greatly accelerates and simplifies cloud-native application development and deployment - which is at the core of building new digital businesses and experiences.
* Bridges developers and IT operations teams, empowering rapid application development while maintaining operational control, reporting, and financial transparency.
* Offers a suite of DevOps capabilities and tooling, enabling a transformational operational model for the enterprise.
* While turnkey in deployment and day-two operations, still provides flexibility and choices of on-premises infrastructure based on VMware vSphere, OpenStack, and VMware Photon Platform.
* Deeply integrated with VCE VxRack System 1000 with Neutrino and FLEX Nodes, for on-premises deployment, and also with Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, VMware vCloud Air, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, as off-premises end-points.

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) announced today the latest addition to its cloud portfolio, Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC) - a turnkey platform for cloud-native application development and deployment. As a fully integrated and engineered platform, NHC enables enterprises to innovate and scale faster. It helps enterprise IT and operations teams to better collaborate with developers, allowing for rapid application development and delivery while providing the needed protection, controls and insight to IT.

In today's dynamically changing digital economy, rapid application development and shortened release cycles are the new normal. DevOps, leveraging continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and a more integrated operating model and culture between developers and IT, can provide a competitive edge, but shifting to DevOps is difficult without the right development platform and tools. Cloud-native platforms address this need. Cloud-native refers to a new software architecture that enables agile application development that follows cloud-native principles, a shift towards microservices versus monolithic app stacks, and embraces container infrastructure abstraction models.

Many enterprise customers have spent months - and in some cases, years - trying to "build" their own cloud-native stacks, and now realise that deploying these stacks is difficult, and maintaining them after "day-two" operations (update/maintain/report/support) is nearly impossible. Many have also suffered seeing multiple waves of cloud-native employees come and go, leaving unfinished pilots that were unsuitable for full production, and were not adequately designed to be supported and sustained for future evolution and growth.

Native Hybrid Cloud helps enterprises realise the promise of cloud-native applications and DevOps with an "It Just Works" experience. The platform has the following components, all validated to work together:

* Continuous Innovation Cloud-Native Platform - Native Hybrid Cloud leverages Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the industry-leading cloud-native platform. Pivotal Cloud Foundry delivers platform capabilities that enhance developer productivity, enable operational excellence, and provide enterprise grade security, scalability, high availability, and operational control, so customers can accelerate their time to market for software solutions. Developers can more quickly design, build, deploy, and scale cloud-native applications because of the tight integration of NHC IaaS with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Applications built using Pivotal Cloud Foundry are truly portable and can elastically run on any cloud - private or public.

* Developer and IT Ops Services - Native Hybrid Cloud brings developers a rich set of services for deploying, scaling, and managing the application life cycle while providing IT with the visibility, control, and financial insights by including logging, monitoring, and reporting, showback, application performance, big data analytics, and management and automation through open APIs. For enterprises seeking real-time business insights, NHC offers an add-on option that produces a comprehensive toolkit for data scientists to perform big data analytics, delivering more differentiated value.

* Turnkey but flexible choices for on-premises and off-premises IaaS options - Native Hybrid Cloud is built on the VCE VxRack System 1000, a hyper-converged rack-scale infrastructure providing a turnkey IaaS experience for application development, deployment, and operations. The VxRack System allows customers to choose the cloud software stack based on their preference: VMware vSphere with FLEX Nodes for customers looking to leverage what they know, a turnkey OpenStack option for those wanting to leverage the OpenStack ecosystem with Neutrino Nodes. In the near future, VMware Photon Platform, a cloud-native infrastructure solution optimised for containers and modern applications, will be supported on Neutrino Nodes, along with data fabric options, including but not limited to the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes provides a simple rack-scale management and orchestration capability for cloud-native IaaS stacks, dramatically simplifying "day-two" operations and scaling infrastructure elastically to match the needs of the developers - making what used to be complex now simple and predictable.

* For customer deployments that require an off-premises IaaS option, EMC Native Hybrid Cloud offers day-one support for leading public clouds: Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure.

For customers initially looking for a cloud-native IaaS system, VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes and FLEX Nodes for cloud-native IaaS is a great option because it speeds the provisioning of resources based on open source technologies to less than one hour.

For many enterprise businesses, Native Hybrid Cloud aligns closer to the agile development strategy as it delivers a turnkey developer platform for cloud-native applications.

Fully supported end-to-end by EMC, sustained as one product and deployable in days, Native Hybrid Cloud enables enterprises to significantly reduce the cost, time, complexity and uncertainty associated with building, deploying and maintaining a cloud-native solution and navigating the cultural shift to DevOps.

Delivering cloud-native apps at the speed of business

Native Hybrid Cloud increases business agility and fosters innovation through an engineered platform that brings together infrastructure elasticity, self-healing, automated application runtime, and extended developer and IT ops services. Key benefits include:

* Deploying a cloud-native developer platform and infrastructure services in as few as two days, composed of Pivotal Cloud Foundry integrated with the EMC and VMware powered IaaS, making it ready for tailoring to a customer environment, if desired. Native Hybrid Cloud delivers 93% faster time-to-code compared to a practice where customers build a complete cloud-native platform from the ground up.
* Three times faster time to market. Develop and deploy cloud-native applications in days or weeks rather than months or years. Rapid application development from idea to production as a result of the extensive developer and IT ops services and tools.
* Improved DevOps collaboration. New DevOps partnerships made possible by self-service capabilities for developers while allowing IT to retain control and insights.
* Two times boost to developer productivity. Developers can self-provision infrastructure for cloud-native application development and enjoy an "It Just Works" user experience. A streamlined workflow and the ecosystem of toolsets simplify how cloud-native applications are built, deployed, and managed.
* Single-call support. EMC provides single-call support for the full solution.
* Reduced complexity. The Native Hybrid Cloud platform is engineered, maintained and sustained as one platform. This means that as the software ecosystem continues to innovate, the Native Hybrid Cloud stack continues to get updated and supported as a singular platform for the customer.

Availibility

EMC Native Hybrid Cloud with VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes and FLEX Nodes will be available starting in Q3, 2016.

Additional resources:

* EMC Community Network Site: https://community.emc.com/community/connect/everything-cloud
* For more information on the EMC Native Hybrid Cloud Platform, go to: http://www.emc.com/solutions/cloud/native-hybrid-cloud.htm.
* To learn more about EMC Solutions, follow @EMCCloud and join the #NativeHybridCloud conversation

Customer quote:

Lance Albertson, Director, Open Source Lab, Oregon State University
"Oregon State University (OSU) through its Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) is committed to development and application of open source. We have made the decision to adopt the new DevOps model and to implement continuous integration and continuous delivery. EMC Native Hybrid Cloud leveraging OpenStack and Cloud Foundry will be a great developer platform that provides a turnkey solution for us and our hosted open source projects to automate code commits and releases, accelerate application development and deployment, and speed innovation, and ultimately help us to boost our impact on the open source community. We support using this platform since it uses many open source technologies as its core, which fits within our mission."

Industry analyst quote:

Brian Gracely, Lead Cloud Computing Analyst, Wikibon
"We're witnessing a radical change in how enterprise IT and developers collaborate. A new style of DevOps model has emerged as a result of the rapid speed required in developing and delivering cloud-native applications. EMC Native Hybrid Cloud is the right solution to enable the adoption of this new style of DevOps, giving enterprise businesses a competitive edge to succeed in the digital era."

EMC executive quote:

Chad Sakac, President, VCE, Converged Platform Division of EMC
"In the new digital economy, innovation and agility trump all. Enterprises differentiate themselves through rapid innovation and agile services delivery. Trying to build, iterate and maintain these stacks built on a series of constantly moving elements is completely a waste of resources - resources that can be better applied elsewhere, because EMC is investing many hundreds of engineers to make it a turnkey platform. An engineered platform that integrates cloud-native IaaS with Pivotal's cloud-native platform, EMC's Native Hybrid Cloud overcomes the challenge in business and IT transformation to enable developers to deliver innovation through new applications, software and digital services better and faster."

Pivotal executive quote:

James Watters, Senior Vice-President of Products, Pivotal
"With Pivotal Cloud Foundry tightly integrated into Native Hybrid Cloud, developers now can drastically shorten the application development and deployment life cycle and operators can manage thousands of apps with far fewer people. An idea for an application on Monday can be running in production by Friday. This is the cloud-native way and it's transforming how the world builds and runs software."

Virtuestream executive quote:

Kevin Reid, President and CTO, Virtustream
"Customers looking to run cloud-native apps off-premises will be able to leverage Virtustream as an endpoint for Native Hybrid Cloud, taking advantage of our on-demand economics, scalability, and available managed services. Customers can confidently develop and deploy cloud-native applications off-premises, leveraging the same levels of service, performance and security we bring to their traditional mission-critical enterprise applications."

VMware executive quote:

Kit Colbert, Vice-President and General Manager, Cloud-Native Applications, VMware
"VMware technologies once again underpin an innovative hybrid cloud solution, with the new Native Hybrid Cloud. VMware vSphere and the Photon Platform with the ability to support both structured and unstructured PaaS, creates a robust, on-premises cloud-native platform that can help enterprises rapidly deliver innovative software and applications today."

EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyse their most valuable asset - information - in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC Federation

EMC Corporation comprises a unique federation of strategically aligned businesses, focused on delivering best-in-class technology and services to help customers transform their business and IT for the digital era. The EMC Federation businesses - EMC Information Infrastructure, Pivotal, RSA, VCE, Virtustream and VMware - each are focused to market and deliver offerings individually or collectively through integrated solutions, providing customers with choice without lock-in. Additional information about the EMC Federation can be found at http://www.emcfederation.com.

EMC Information Infrastructure

EMC Information Infrastructure is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyse their most valuable asset - information - in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

Pivotal

Pivotal's Cloud Native platform drives software innovation for many of the world's most admired brands. With millions of developers in communities around the world, Pivotal technology touches billions of users every day. After shaping the software development culture of Silicon Valley's most valuable companies for over a decade, today Pivotal leads a global technology movement transforming how the world builds software.

Virtustream

Virtustream, an EMC Federation company, is the enterprise-class cloud software and service provider trusted by enterprises worldwide to migrate and run their mission-critical applications in the cloud. For enterprises, service providers and government agencies, Virtustream's software and infrastructure as a service solutions meet the security, compliance, performance, efficiency, and consumption-based billing requirements of complex production applications in the cloud - whether private, public or hybrid. Virtustream owns and operates data centres in the US and Europe with service provider partner data centres in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.

VMware

VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility. Built on VMware's industry-leading virtualisation technology, its solutions deliver a brave new model of IT that is fluid, instant and more secure. Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application. With 2015 revenues of $6.6 billion, VMware has more than 500 000 customers and 75 000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley, with offices throughout the world, and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

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