Full disclosure: I work for EMC and am a lead architect in the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud “SWAT” team.
What is it?
Much like VCE Vblock converged infrastructure systems, EHC is an engineered solution. This means that its components have been tested and integrated to work together and it is supported as a unit.
The Value
I compare the solution to Vblock frequently, because in the early days of VCE/Acadia, many people did not understand the value of converged infrastructure. It took a while for many folks to understand how it saves time, frustration and money over building a solution in-house from selected components. Nowadays, most enterprise IT shops understand that converged infrastructure brings a level of integrated support that is not available when you support individual components of the solution.
EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud: Federation SDDC Edition (just “EHC” for this discussion) brings many VMware and EMC components together with integration and support. Sure, the front-end of EHC – what you’ve seen pictures of – is VMware vRealize Automation. What you may not see in that picture is the integration of EMC ViPR that allows selected admins to provision a new datastore to hosts in a vSphere cluster from the same portal. You may not see in that picture the tight Backup-as-a-Service integration with IaaS; while requesting a new VM, the requestor can select a backup policy for the new VM. It is automatically added to a backup job and the machine owner can choose to perform a backup or restore on demand – from the same portal.
Another important feature of EHC that cannot be “seen” is the vast engineering time that has been put into ensuring the components and their versions work together flawlessly. You cannot see the countless hours spent testing and retesting the workflows to ensure they behave as expected.
It is this time that the EMC EHC team has invested in the solution, so that customers can rely on the solution for Enterprise IT operations and not have to worry about version x.xx of a component working correctly with version y.yy of another.
Lastly, the EHC solution is ready to use very quickly. This means that customer’s time-to-value is very short and they can begin realizing the benefits almost immediately.
The Future
The EHC Federation SDDC edition will continue to evolve, using newer versions of components only once they’ve been fully vetted. I predict more integration with network services, a solution integrated with RecoverPoint, VPLEX and Site Recovery Manager.
Conclusion
Jeez, this does sound like a marketing pitch, sorry. I really do thing this is a great solution and a great direction from EMC. I won’t give away any of the secrets in the solution, but you can bet that the fix to some of the bumps-in-the-road we hit will be blogged about here.
Brian Ragazzi 