Fresh from EMC World held this week in Las Vegas, Nevada, EMC Corporation has announced the latest addition to its cloud portfolio, Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC) – a turnkey platform for cloud-native application development and deployment. As a fully integrated and engineered platform, NHC enables enterprises to innovate and scale faster. It helps enterprise IT and operations teams to better collaborate with developers, allowing for rapid application development and delivery while providing the needed protection, controls and insight to IT.

The company explained that in today's dynamically changing digital economy, rapid application development and shortened release cycles are the new normal. DevOps, leveraging continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and a more integrated operating model and culture between developers and IT, can provide a competitive edge, but shifting to DevOps is difficult without the right development platform and tools. Cloud-native platforms address this need.

Cloud-native refers to a new software architecture that enables agile application development that follows cloud-native principles, a shift toward microservices versus monolithic app stacks, and embraces container infrastructure abstraction models.

The case for cloud native

Many enterprise customers have spent months – and in some cases years - trying to “build” their own cloud-native stacks, and now realize that deploying these stacks is difficult, and maintaining them after “day two” operations (update/maintain/report/support) is nearly impossible. Many have also suffered seeing multiple waves of cloud-native employees come and go, leaving unfinished pilots that were unsuitable for full production, and were not adequately designed to be supported and sustained for future evolution and growth.

Native Hybrid Cloud helps enterprises realize the promise of cloud-native applications and DevOps with an “It Just Works” experience. The platform has the following components, all validated to work together:

·       Continuous Innovation Cloud-Native Platform – Native Hybrid Cloud leverages Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the industry-leading cloud-native platform. Pivotal Cloud Foundry delivers platform capabilities that enhance developer productivity, enable operational excellence, and provide enterprise grade security, scalability, high availability, and operational control, so customers can accelerate their time to market for software solutions. Developers can more quickly design, build, deploy, and scale cloud-native applications because of the tight integration of NHC IaaS with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Applications built using Pivotal Cloud Foundry are truly portable and can elastically run on any cloud – private or public.

·       Developer and IT Ops Services – Native Hybrid Cloud brings developers a rich set of services for deploying, scaling, and managing the application life cycle while providing IT the visibility, control, and financial insights by including logging, monitoring, and reporting, showback, application performance, big data analytics, and management and automation through open APIs. For enterprises seeking real-time business insights, NHC offers an add-on option that produces a comprehensive toolkit for data scientists to perform big data analytics, delivering more differentiated value.

·       Turnkey – but flexible choices for On-Premises and Off-Premises IaaS Options –Native Hybrid Cloud is built on the VCE VxRack System 1000, a hyper-converged rack-scale infrastructure providing a turnkey IaaS experience for application development, deployment, and operations. The VxRack System allows customers to choose the cloud software stack based on their preference: VMware vSphere with FLEX Nodes for customers looking to leverage what they know, a turnkey OpenStack option for those wanting to leverage the OpenStack ecosystem with Neutrino Nodes. In the near future, VMware Photon Platform, a cloud-native infrastructure solution optimized for containers and modern applications, will be supported on Neutrino Nodes, along with data fabric options including, but not limited to the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes provides a simple rack-scale management and orchestration capability for cloud-native IaaS stacks, dramatically simplifying “day two” operations and scaling infrastructure elastically to match the needs of the developers – making what used to be complex now simple and predictable.

·       For customer deployments that require an off-premise IaaS option, EMC Native Hybrid Cloud offers day one support for leading public clouds: Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure.

Beginnings steps

For customers initially looking for a cloud-native IaaS system, VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes and FLEX Nodes for cloud-native IaaS is a great option because it speeds the provisioning of resources based on open source technologies to less than one hour.

For many enterprise businesses, Native Hybrid Cloud aligns closer to the agile development strategy as it delivers a turnkey developer platform for cloud-native applications.

Fully supported end-to-end by EMC, sustained as one product and deployable in days, Native Hybrid Cloud enables enterprises to significantly reduce the cost, time, complexity and uncertainty associated with building, deploying and maintaining a cloud-native solution and navigating the cultural shift to DevOps.

Unpacking the benefits

Native Hybrid Cloud increases business agility and fosters innovation through an engineered platform that brings together infrastructure elasticity, self-healing, automated application runtime, and extended developer and IT Ops services. Key benefits include:

·       Deploy a cloud-native developer platform and infrastructure services in as few as two days, composed of Pivotal Cloud Foundry integrated with the EMC and VMware powered IaaS, making it ready for tailoring to a customer environment, if desired. Native Hybrid Cloud delivers 93% faster time-to-code compared to a practice where customers build a complete cloud-native platform from the ground up.

·       3x faster time to market. Develop and deploy cloud-native applications in days or weeks rather than months or years. Rapid application development from idea to production as a result of the extensive developer and IT Ops services and tools.

·       Improved DevOps collaboration. New DevOps partnerships made possible by self-service capabilities for developers while allowing IT to retain control and insights.

·       2x boost to developer productivity. Developers can self-provision infrastructure for cloud-native application development and enjoy an “it just works” user experience. A streamlined workflow and the ecosystem of toolsets simplify how cloud-native applications are built, deployed, and managed.

·       Single-call support. EMC provides single-call support for the full solution.

·       Reduced complexity. The Native Hybrid Cloud platform is engineered, maintained and sustained as one platform. This means that as the software ecosystem continues to innovate, the Native Hybrid Cloud stack continues to get updated and supported as a singular platform for the customer.

Final thoughts

Chad Sakac, President, VCE, Converged Platform Division of EMC pointed out that in the new digital economy, innovation and agility trumps all. Additionally, he noted that enterprises differentiate themselves through rapid innovation and agile services delivery.

“Trying to build, iterate and maintain these stacks built on a series of constantly moving elements is completely a waste of resources – resources that can be better applied elsewhere, because EMC is investing many hundreds of engineers to make it a turnkey platform. An engineered platform that integrates cloud-native IaaS with Pivotal's cloud-native platform, EMC's Native Hybrid Cloud overcomes the challenge in business and IT transformation to enable developers to deliver innovation through new applications, software and digital services better and faster,” he concluded.

EMC Native Hybrid Cloud with VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes and FLEX Nodes will be available starting in Q3, 2016.

The announcement is certainly a substantial one, and it only augments what has already been a busy half of the year for the company. Earlier this year, EMC debuted its VXRail Appliance, aimed squarely at helping small and medium businesses. It followed that up by launching the enterprise focused VXMax All Flash, and then, not a month later, announced a partnership with Ernst & Young to address cybersecurity threats. Most recently, Dell and EMC unveiled Dell Technologies and Dell EMC, with the latter serving as a sub-brand to serve enterprise customers. It does make one wonder what EMC has planned for the rest of the year, and how much change still lies in store.