What the Modern Data Centre Looks Like from EMC's Perspective

August 12, 2016

We sat down with David van der Knaap, EMC’s Senior All-Flash Account Manager for Eastern Canada, and discussed EMC’s vision on today’s Modern Data Centre. Dave was able to share his insights on this transformation, and provide insight on how EMC is helping customers in their journey to a Modern Data Centre.

What is EMC’s vision of a Modern Data Centre?

The First step towards creating a Modern Data Centre is to explore the benefits of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure.

Companies no longer need to build their own IT by selecting components from a variety of manufactures to create a heterogeneous environment and hope that everything will work together. Customers now have the flexibility of choosing converged infrastructure, where compute, networking and storage are all engineered to work together. When deployed, the focus can now be placed on the core competencies of the business, while having confidence that the infrastructure can always meet the needs of the business.

The second step with a Modern Data Centre is the process of automation.  Whether you’re deploying VMware or Open Stack, you will want to be able to consume Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to have that self-service catalogue –  that portal within your infrastructure to provide actual services to your users.

There are a lot of process changes that happen within the Data Centre once you go down this route. Since you’re building a lot of automation in your Data Centre, your staff can focus their attention on innovation and bringing more value to your business.

In the end, this is what it’s all about, the Modern Data Centre is about being agile, while the roles of the people change. EMC can help every single step of the way, and this what we’ve been helping our clients achieve: whether it’s the people, the processes, the infrastructure, the automation layer, we are helping guide our customers towards their modernization and efficiency goals.

What does EMC do differently than other vendors in the data storage space?

From my time at EMC, what stands out between EMC and the others in this space is the amount of innovation that we do. We have the most market share in the storage space, and we’ve always been at the forefront of innovation. With that said, innovation is a two-fold process, and where EMC is so good at differentiating ourselves is capitalizing on opportunities.

A great example of this is when we acquired XtremIO in 2011. It’s no secret that VMAX has always been at the heart of EMC. There’s no better platform out there delivering such robust enterprise availability, it’s really the gold standard. Knowing that all-flash was the future of the data center, we were so surgical in execution with the XtremIO go-to market strategy, even if that meant cannibalizing some of our other, more established, lines of business. The reality was that we had better technology that could better fit our customer’s needs, and we weren’t afraid to pivot towards it.

Being able to do that is very difficult for companies to do, especially when it’s at the core of your business. EMC excels at doing just that, researching the trends, innovating within our space, and always having a customer-centric view of our solutions, and I think that’s the number one reason we’ve remained the market leader.

What are some of the biggest advantages and disadvantages to moving onto the cloud?

With regards to advantages, cloud enables customers to focus on their core business and the possibility of reducing the amount spent on IT infrastructure is a huge benefit to companies. For example, when we look at some of our customers in Aerospace, their purpose is to build complex flying machines. IT is a necessity because of the nature of their business, but their core business is building airplanes, not building IT. This is the same thing with all our clients, it doesn’t matter where you are, or what industry you’re in.

Another key benefit is the gains on efficiency and manageability. Customers want to have a holistic view on their infrastructure. The management of all of this has been dramatically simplified now, where it was previously so much more complex and difficult to maintain such visibility.

One caveat is that not every workload is ready to migrate to the cloud; you must evaluate its suitability on a workload by workload basis and decide what you want to leverage the cloud for.

On the disadvantages side, it’s very hard for companies to relinquish control of their infrastructures. I think it’s always been a core part of companies and it’s a major decision to hand over control and have other providers give that service to you. So you don’t necessarily control your SLA SLOs.

There’s also a misconception that there’s always going to be cost savings, but the cost savings don’t necessarily mean it’s going to be cheaper when evaluated over the long-run. Customers need fully evaluate their cloud strategy and what optimal mix is going to be right for them.

What is the VCE VxRack system, and what’s different about it versus other Converged Infrastructure systems?

Converged infrastructure, like Vblocks, will have individual server, storage, and networking components that are all managed and engineered to work as a single system. With VxRack, everything becomes Software Defined, so you have Software Defined storage options that are either done from ScaleIO or VMware VSAN, and you have more flexibility.

You could have storage nodes, you could have compute heavy nodes, but the important part, is that it always follows the main tenants of the modern Data Centre, where everything is modular and highly scalable, and you’re just adding nodes as your needs grow. We’ve also recently made announcements around a platform node, called Neutrino, which allows you to easily deploy cloud-native infrastructure as a service (IaaS) within hours.

Then there is the VxRail system, a hyper-converged system better suited for smaller, environments that wouldn’t require the scale of a vBlock or VxRack system.

Where should an organization start when they are evaluating the available Data Centre solutions in the marketplace?

Always start with the workload first, figure out what the needs are, and then work your way down to figure out the required infrastructure. Infrastructure requirements for more traditional applications like SAP will be different from cloud-native applications or Hadoop-based solutions. There is no such thing as “one size fits all” in infrastructure, and this is where partners like Northern Micro and EMC can help guide customers.