Last week I visited a customer that recently ordered a vBlock through the VCE Coalition. I was curious to hear their plans.
I have a vested interest in the success of the team deploying the new configuration.
They all work for EMC's IT department.
My Lexicon
With my background in storage systems, switch topologies, kernel drivers, etc., I attended the meeting armed with my suitcase full of terms and acronyms that describe the flow of information from application down to the storage media:
The words driver, HBAs, ports, zones, SAN, FC, directors, shares, directories, mount points, NFS, CIFS, SCSI, cache, flash, SAS, sync/async mirroring, NOVRAM, and SCSI are all terms that I am familiar with. I can stack these terms end-to-end to describe the physical flow through the hardware plumbing.
When it comes to the individuals at a customer site, however, the large majority care very little about these terms. They would rather not have to know them (at least not to the depths that they have in the past).
The New Lexicon
What I found was a new set of new terms that describe logical information flow:
JMS, AMQP, Rabbit/Sonic MQ, Spring, JMX, Hyperic, payload, serialization, SME, ESB, customer objects, XML, Apex, SalesForce.com, A2A, B2B, GemFire, Grails, tcServer, ABAP, MVC, JSON, common information cloud, and POJO.
I chuckled a bit when I listened to how silly it is to hear someone say POJO. Then I remembered my wife's reaction every time I say the word "SCSI". Maybe POJO isn't all that bad.
Cloud Information Flow
This new lexicon represents the "cloud wiring" that sits on top of their vBlock deployment. It simplifies the integration framework that will allow dozens (if not hundreds) of developers to implement business requirements. It will eventually replace the ad-hoc and point-to-point scripting, batching, and web services activity that attempt to mine and leverage information across the corporation. The problem is being attacked by standardizing on one framework (the VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform), getting rid of specialized middleware, and more fully abstracting the development community away from the underlying database implementation.
Most importantly, the adoption of a vFabric Framework is a key piece of the hybrid cloud model. If the vFabric Framework can be used both inside the firewall (private cloud) and outside the firewall (e.g. when accessing data in a SalesForce.com-type model), then EMC developers can leverage their familiarity with the framework in order to effectively gather and mine information across private and public clouds.
This last point is key because so many of EMC's partners want access (B2B) to our private and public data in a common, unified, and secure way.
In future posts I hope to dive into this cloud plumbing in a bit more detail, including some more detail about how the Spring Framework can be leveraged in hybrid cloud deployments.
Steve
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