VMworld 2016: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 4.0 and dot.next.

What is the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud?   Answer – it is a turnkey IaaS platform that optimizes for the enterprise applications that dominate the existing datacenter.   These are applications that need all sorts of infrastructure services.

What is it built from?   Answer, VMware and EMC’s technologies (see below – the SDDC and Cloud Management/Operations are vSphere, NSX, vRealize Suite) – all running on our CI and HCI engineered systems… but that’s the wrong way to look at it :-)

That is a “bottom up” look. 

EHC was born when customers came to us and said: “These point technologies are all fine and dandy, but it’s so hard to put them all together and once they are running – sustaining, maintaining them and all the associated workflows - ugh” (and for perspective these are orders of magnitude easier than less mature, less enterprise focused stacks). That my friends is a material engineering challenge.  We have hundreds of people that work on these engineered stacks and sustaining them.

A more appropriate (and correct way to measure whether EHC measures up) way to look at it is this:

The team behind this is part of my charter at EMC (and in the future too). 

I constantly remind them every day – their mission can be described simply: “close the gap of one-time and steady state consumption complexity with AWS”.  Furthermore – I task them to aim to require no services to deploy and update.   Even further – I task them to offer simple full consumption economic models.

That is their north star – and not an easy charter. They are a great team, and EHC 4.0 is closer than ever before – but we’re not there yet.

Why aren’t we there yet?

• Supporting on premises models is REALLY hard.  Partially because it invites “deconstruction” of the stack.   But we believe (and our customers tell us) that certain workloads, for economic, governance, and data gravity/speed of light reasons need this.
• The stack is too complex still.  VMware’s efforts with us around Cloud Foundations will ultimately simplify the bottom parts of the stack, particularly the “day 2 lifecycle” operations – similar to how Neutrino does it for Cloud Native Stacks.   What many vendors miss (but not customers!) is that the lifecycle fragility of the workflows at the very top are the hardest of all – and ultimately that’s what the customer wants to be constant.   Change any of the elements below and if they break the workflows at the top – you just broke it.
• We’re aiming for generalized Enterprise classic apps with EHC – which sure as heck are not following 12-factor app, cloud native principles.   They are hairballs, with rich infrastructure services requirements.  In fact, when you go for the WORST OF THE WORST (huge classic SAP ERP landscapes that are the beating heart of so many enterprises) – we’ve found you need a purpose-built IaaS, which is what Virtustream and xStream are.   If EHC aims for 90% of the classic enterprise – Virtustream and xStream aim at the 10% of the most Business Critical Apps.

That all said – I want to be clear.  If you want a turnkey, sustained IaaS for your traditional app stacks – and want a self-service capability, EHC is the best answer EMC and VMware have to offer.   I ask in return – be clear to yourself – if you want to built it yourself, EHC is not for you :-)

So – today, EHC requires some lift, and some services.   But – with each release the VMware and EMC team strive to make it easier, and aim at the north star.

The VMware Cloud Foundation announcement and VxRail/VxRack SDDC are examples of these efforts.  VMware Validated Designs are another such effort.   Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is one such effort.

In fact, that’s exactly how they work.   Products (VxBlock/VxRack/VxRail, vSphere, NSX, vRealize) –> integrated and simplified products (VMware Cloud Foundation) –> Validated Solutions (VVDs, Dell Hybrid Cloud for VMware) –> Turnkey Platforms which are highly opinionated (Enterprise Hybrid Cloud).

It’s a “build –> buy” continuum.

EHC (and other platforms we make like the Native Hybrid Cloud paltform) are VERY opinionated.   I constantly remind our customers and our field (and this confuses some – but it also is simple) – a platform discussion involves a lot of “NO, we don’t do that” discussion.

Think clearly about this… Platforms (like AWS for an example) have nearly infinite ways you can build ON TOP of them – but they are by definition “highly opinionated” – you cannot disassemble them, or optimize them BELOW their features/APIs/behaviors.   You can have “very modifiable”, or you can have “very outcome oriented” – you cannot have them both.

With each EHC release – the team aims for the north star – but also adds new capabilities (I constantly reinforce that new capabilities are lower in importance than simplification.

In this release of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud – version 4.0, yes, we simplified.  Yes, we have continually refined.   But – the team also added:

• Core product updates – notably vRealize 7.0 support – and this will continue to accelerate as the VMware and EMC team work more closely together.
• Multi-site support – up to 4 sites.  That is quite a feat.  It means that the workflows at the top are designed to be sustained in multi-site and operate in all sorts of failure modes and NSX network topologies.
• Rich per-VM remote replication and DR capabilities that can be driven via policy and automated workflows.
• Industry-leading VM-level encryption that can be driven via policy and automated workflows.  This is powered by an EMC technology called CloudLink which is an absolutely GREAT tool.   Simple.  Cloud-agnostic (which means that you can have hybrid cloud encryption, where you maintain key control).   Now – deeply integrated in the full service catalog.   BTW – if you want to play with CloudLink a fun factoid – it’s very popular in the Azure Marketplace here.

Enough talk – demo-time, excellent!

The Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is becoming a material platform business for EMC and VMware – with huge (and very demanding) customers – and we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars per year.   I’m convinced that this is a billion+ dollar business – but far from an easy one.   Things like AFAs, SDS, HCI – these are “easier” businesses.

… But we must continually strive for that north star with our 4 hybrid cloud platforms: with the VMware stack for traditional workloads (Enterprise Hybrid Cloud); with Cloud Foundry in the lead for new cloud native workloads as well as save our customers from websphere (Native Hybrid Cloud); with Microsoft Azure for customers leaning into Azure; and with Virtustream for the hairiest of the classic business critical apps.

And.. yes, we are already cranking on our EHC dot.next release – with that “always simpler” focus, but also looking at the future of vRealize and Cloud Foundations as important factors… stay tuned – and you won’t need to stay tuned long!

Congrats to the EHC team – you have a hard, but noble mission, and EHC 4.0 is a huge release!!!