Manoj Chugh, President, EMC India & SAARC and Director, Global Accounts, Asia Pacific & Japan, in conversation with N Geetha, elaborates on EMC’s journey to the cloud and the strategy around
virtualisation — the first step towards cloud adoption

When did EMC begin its journey to the cloud?

EMC started its journey (globally) to the cloud years ago, long before the term cloud became popular, laying the foundation for more focussed efforts that began in 2004.

In the year, EMC faced challenges familiar to most IT organisations: unrelenting growth of applications, servers, and storage arrays in the data centre that strained the capacity of existing resources.
When the company’s global IT function decided to leverage the power of private cloud, one of its key objectives was to deliver IT-as-a- service. The company aimed to optimise both, IT delivery and business consumption of services, and be the service provider of choice. EMC aimed to enable end-to-end, on-demand, self-service provisioning of IT services to its business units.

Our journey to the private cloud between 2004 and 2009 alone resulted in benefits such as: Reduced backup volumes. By an average of 95 per cent using Avamar in concert with Data Domain systems. The amount of data protected increased by well over 40 per cent.

Desktop/laptop protection. Data reduction averaged 96 per cent per backup, providing consistently faster backups than the previous online service with negligible performance and network impact. Overall data backup volumes have been reduced by 50 per cent, decreasing backup time by 75 per cent. The number of physical tape libraries was reduced by 60 per cent, and the number of virtual tape libraries was reduced by 53 per cent. EMC now supports backup of over 2,000 virtual machine clients. Its IT administrators are taking advantage of key tools such as Data Protection Advisor and Lonix for IT operations intelligence to monitor, manage, and automate data protection processes.

Measurable cost savings. Moving from an all-tape backup strategy to a mix of disk and tape has reduced the cost of tape media, and in the long term, more cost savings will be realised with the elimination of tape infrastructure and media vaulting.

Is cloud real and disruptive?

Cloud computing is well and truly disruptive. In simple terms, while information is growing at over 60 per cent, IT budgets are growing at single digits only, posing significant constraints for the CIOs and IT managers. This has prompted them to find better ways to manage infrastructure, where cloud plays a major role.

Where does storage stand in the cloud model?

For cloud computing to be successful as a model, the ability to store, secure and access information in real time will be critical, which is where we play a vital role.

What is the cloud adoption scenario?

It is beyond doubt that private cloud is on the upswing, as 75 per cent of the cloud deployment has happened around private cloud.

The EMC-Zinnov study estimates that while the total cloud computing market in India will grow from US$ 400 mn currently to US$ 4.5 bn by 2015; the market will be dominated by private cloud adoption, which will account for US$ 3.5 bn in revenues.

There will be an increased preference for private cloud over public cloud in the next five years in India, as it is more reliable, and the network uptime and security are under the IT head’s (user’s) control. Public cloud adoption on the other hand will be hindered by issues related to data security and latency; possibility of data centres being located in areas threatened by natural disasters; corporate governance and auditing issues; and vendor lock-in.

We anticipate hybrid clouds to become the eventual goal of customers once they have advanced on their journey to the private cloud to a point where they can choose the resources they want to manage in-house and allow others to be managed externally.

With data growing at 60 per cent resulting in a deluge; managing it is going to be a Herculean task, given the fact that the IT market is growing at 20 per cent. To ensure that IT investments are protected and to reduce capex, customers will have to look at public cloud.

What are the deterrents in moving to the cloud?

It is largely to do with either scepticism, as organisations wait for someone else to make the move first, or upfront capital investment restrictions. The other reason could also be around the hype that cloud computing is very complex to implement and manage, when it is not. IT teams are not completely familiar with the entire benefits of cloud computing, and hence, are resistant to its full-blown adoption.

How can senior IT managers justify cloud adoption?

An IDC-EMC study expects exponential growth of digital information, from 2009 to 2020. In such a scenario, CIOs and IT managers must derive greater efficiency from their IT purchases without heavy capital investments, and yet manage the enormity of digital information growth. Only a transformational change in IT environment can help address this gigantic challenge: and that can be by adopting the cloud.

The key considerations for IT managers to push for a cloud model would include:
1.    Evaluating existing IT infrastructure portfolio against organisational requirements of today and the future and mapping service level needs.
2.    Evaluating future IT requirement against budget outlay, vendor services and maturity levels available, to determine which IT services need to be moved to the cloud.
3.    Identifying an end-to-end vendor solutions provider who brings a cohesive ecosystem to simplify cloud environment and avoid vendor lock-in.

Is there a sequential pattern that CIOs need to follow in moving to the cloud?

EMC recommends a phased migration approach for customers.
It all starts with virtualisation of servers and storage:

Consolidation: storage, networks, applications and data centres. Storage consolidation alone can result in 2:1 savings.

Virtualisation: a means for server consolidation – regularly accomplishes 10:1 or better ratios of virtual to physical instances.

Build: in security through identity assurance and access control; encryption and key management; compliance and security information management; and fraud protection.

Tier it: EMC has long advocated tiered storage and at 25 per cent TCO advantages, the economic benefits are compelling.

De-duplication: of data is another means for significant data reductions, especially in backup operations.

Apply: software and process automation for further benefits.

Evaluate: cost of setting up private cloud vis-à-vis partnering with an external cloud service vendor to identify suitable model.

How many of your customers have (%) moved to the cloud model? Which of these are increasingly used – Iaas, Saas or PaaS?

We are seeing a large number of our customers virtualising their existing infrastructure, which means they are already on the journey to the cloud. Last year, when we held the EMC Forum in India, a 100 per cent of 197 people who were polled around virtualisation said, they were virtualising their existing infrastructure. And, about 75 per cent of people said they had virtualised around 35 per cent of their infrastructure already.

We have received an overwhelming response to Vblock in the industry. Currently, we have six deployments in the country and a very healthy pipeline of prospects. In addition to some of the IT giants in India, our customers include EXL Service and KPIT Cummins.

According to the EMC-Zinnov study, we see that SaaS and IaaS are the most commonly used purposes for cloud computing.

Please give insights into the cost-benefit analysis of cloud.

The recent EMC-Zinnov study found that private cloud deployments can result in potential savings of up to 50 per cent on IT investments across the following key areas:

Telecom & networking: The increase in data services cost is offset by reduction in networking hardware due to consolidation.

Facilities & fabric: Data centre size and power consumption is reduced as the hardware is consolidated.

Hardware: Reduction in 50x86 servers and storage costs as a result of consolidation.

Software: Reduction in software costs as better multi-tenant applications replace enterprise applications.

Internal labour: Steep reduction in internal labour costs, as the management of data centre is consolidated and automated. Lesser maintenance of data centre required.

External IT services: Reduction in IT services due to right-sizing of data centre and configurations.

How do you handle security aspect of the cloud?

Many of the physical assets in an organisation’s existing data centre can be applied to the cloud infrastructure. Firewalls and data leakage prevention (DLP) appliances can be applied in a virtual environment to monitor and maintain the same level of security. The threat landscape remains the same. Organisations must remember that the standard defence-in-depth approach is essential.

What is the IT spending on cloud services in India?

According to our study, there is a good spending pattern expected on cloud services in the next few years. For instance, the IT/ITeS segment will spend around $76 mn; telecom $71 mn; BFSI $60 mn; manufacturing, government, energy/power and utility sectors around $56 mn, $48 mn and $28 mn respectively; and healthcare, retail and others have allocated $24 mn, $5 mn and $33 mn respectively, towards cloud services.