Framing the Cloud Portfolio

In a previous post I discussed a strategy for establishing research directions between EMC’s Cairo Center of Excellence (COE) and Egyptian Universities and national technologists.  I used the diagram below to describe the initial information exchange that will serve as the foundation for establishing research directions.

A critical part of the innovation exchange process is framing the conversation. Any discussion about a cloud product portfolio should use the language of the customer use cases. They do not want to hear about “storage”, or “information security”, or “management frameworks”.  They would prefer to receive a technology overview that maps to a specific subset of cloud characteristics (e.g. as defined by NIST). 

What I’ve listed below are three sample characteristics, followed by product offerings that map to the category. When it comes to cloud, EMC’s majority ownership of VMware adds a large amount of technology to the discussion. The list is by no means complete, and several product offerings span multiple categories.

Once the product capabilities have been described, the teams will then use the innovation-by-adjacency approach to brainstorm research directions for cloud use cases.

Resource Pooling (multi-tenancy)

1. VMAX/VNX: scalable cloud storage systems that support multi-tenancy.
2. Vblock: pre-integrated, tested, and validated server, network, storage, and security for cloud deployments from VCE.
3. Isilon: cloud file system technology scalable up to 10PB.
4. GreenPlum: massively parallel, cloud-scale data storage and analytics.
5. Atmos: geographically distributed, multi-tenant cloud storage for unstructured content.
6. Documentum: a centralized document repository that supports multi-tenant workflows via xCP technology (see this use case).
7. vCloud Director: catalog-based tool enabling resource pooling of the underlying infrastructure.

Elasticity

1. VPLEX: federated data mobility and connectivity within and between cloud data centers.
2. CloudFoundry: normalized, open platform for application deployment to multiple cloud service providers.
3. RabbitMQ: industry standard cloud messaging queuing within and between clouds.
4. GemFire: scalable, high-performance memory-based caching across distributed servers.

Measured service

1. UIM: unified cloud infrastructure manager for vBlock, gathering statistics across server, network, storage, and application layers.
2. Hyperic: high-volume virtualized application and infrastructure metrics and eventing.

In addition to the subset of NIST characteristics, there are several other cloud topics that round out a more complete portfolio:

 Cloud Application Platform Technologies

1. Spring: Enterprise Java development platform
2. ERS (Apache): Enterprise-ready Apache with cloud load balancing
3. tcServer: Tomcat runtime server for cloud applications.

Cloud Security Tools and Services

1. eFraudNetwork: RSA’s shared CyberCrime repository.
2. Consumer Strong Authentication: RSA Machine Learning/Modeling of cloud consumer transactions.
3. Archer GRC: industry standard governance profiles from the Cloud Security Alliance.
4. Tricipher: Federated Identify for Cloud Services.
5. vShield: security for virtual datacenters

A thorough discussion of this portfolio, when framed against the cloud use cases, should lead to the creation of research proposals. The portfolio of products listed above is by no means a complete list, but it is more than enough as a starting point.

Future posts will focus on EMC’s internal cloud roadmap and how it relates to potential topics for cloud research.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur