Building a Microsoft Azure Private Cloud – Powered by EMC VNX Storage

Recently EMC held a Microsoft Summit, where a lot of the Microsoft savvy engineers and business folks within EMC get together to share their stories and lessons learned.

One of the highlights of these sessions is always the work of Txomin Barturen -who is our resident Microsoft expert in EMC’s Office of the CTO.

His blog can be found here:  http://datatothepeople.wordpress.com/
(Bookmark it, and look for videos and blog posts soon to follow)

This year his session focused on our work within Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, Private Clouds and the powerful Azure Pack for Windows.

Sure, everyone knows about EMC’s affinity towards VMware (EMC’s VNX was rated best storage for VMware 3 years in a row), but many don’t know how focused we are on Hyper-V and helping customers power their Microsoft Cloud.

EMC is committed to becoming the best storage for private clouds for enterprises and service providers who wish to deploy private and/or public clouds for their customers – on VMware or Hyper-V.

Evidence of EMC’s Microsoft Private Cloud Work

To get to this stage, we’ve had to do a lot of work.

• We have an SMI-S provider which lets SCVMM (Virtual Machine Manager) create and manage large numbers of virtual machines.
• We have the EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) for Windows, which contains the plug-ins necessary to integrate VNX storage into System Center Operations Manager, Orchestrator, and as a result Service Manager.
• We’ve built and opened up an extensive library of PowerShell commandlets that allow for advanced scripting and programming, which can be readily seen by one of our best field technologists Karsten Bott.  See his excellent work here.

And beyond our engineering ability, we also showcased our agility.

• VNX was the first storage platform to support SMB 3.0 (VNX & VNXe)
• VNX was the first storage platform to demonstrate ODX (TechEd 2012)
• Our Elab aggressively submits Windows Logo certifications (EMC currently has the most Windows 2012 R2 certs)

Where do you find these materials? 

We’ve built Microsoft Private Cloud (Proven) solutions on VNXe, VNX & VMAX leveraging SMI-S / PowerShell that can be found and delivered through EMC’s VSPEX program or as part of our Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track solutions (which are Microsoft validated, ready-to-run reference architectures).  You can find more about this work here.

Getting to a More Agile Cloud

Txomin’s presentation talked about how customers want all that an Azure Public Cloud model offers in terms of agility and management but without the loss of control (a on-premises cloud deployment).  They want to offer *-as-a-Service models, elastic scale, a self-service model for tenants, but without the SLA risks that are out of IT control when deploying on a full private cloud.

The Middle Ground:  The Azure Pack for Windows

Microsoft is putting together some really interesting cloud management software with Azure Pack for Windows.  The Azure Pack for Windows is a free downloadable set of services that offer the same interface as the Azure public cloud option, but provide more control for companies who are not willing to deploy on the public cloud for reasons due to performance, reliability, security, and compliance concerns.

Since we’ve done all of the baseline private cloud work, now we can use these as a foundation for building a Microsoft Private Cloud on-premises with a VNX storage platform using the new Azure Pack for Windows.

Built atop the new Windows Server 2012 R2 platform, the Windows Azure Pack (WAP) enables public-cloud like management and services without the risk.   This layers right on top of EMC’s Windows Fast Track & Private Cloud offerings without any additional technology required.

Although it offers a limited subset of services, we expect that Microsoft will introduce more service as customers adopt this new model.

One of the first use cases Microsoft is focusing on is the service providers who want better management for their Microsoft clouds.   This will allow for new integrations and capabilities that weren’t previously available.   IT staff can treat business units as Tenants, offer pre-configured solutions via Gallery, enable self-service management by tenants (delegated Admin).  They can also view utilization and reporting available through System Center/3^rd party integrations which are fully extensible through Operations Manager, Orchestrator and Virtual Machine Manager.

This is truly the future of Microsoft’s virtualization Strategy and EMC is right there to enable customers to build the best, most reliable, secure, manageable private cloud.

But what about Data Protection?

Well, our colleagues in the Backup and Recovery Systems division of EMC are no slackers.  They saw the same trends and are eager to help customers stay protected as they move to the cloud.

In this demo Alex Almeida, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager for EMC’s Backup and Recovery Systems demonstrates how the EMC Data Protection Suite provides full support for Windows Azure Private Cloud Backup and Recovery:

So let me correct my statement…  EMC is right there to enable customers to build the best, most reliable, secure, manageable private cloud – AND PROTECT IT.