With the opening of their new 450,000 sq ft facility in Durham, NC, ENC practices what they are preaching with respect to the cloud and future technologies. Housing a research facility, datacenter and a showcase for their cloud computing initiatives and technologies, the new Tier III facility (AKA, Center of Excellence and Cloud Datacenter) is a critical component in EMC own technology growth path despite being their seventh ”Center of Excellence” opened worldwide. Not all COE’s contain datacenters, for cloud services or otherwise, but they are locations where services are performend by, and provided for, the EMC business units and customers.
EMC has been moving away from a dedicated physical infrastructure to a highly virtualized, responsive, flexible datacenter environment since 2004. The new datacenter architecture is based on the Vblock Infrastructure Platform, which is the turnkey, private cloud infrastructure company, VCE (the Virtual Cloud Environment Company) launched by EMC and Cisco. Vblock is intended to provide a converged infrastructure environment that is rapidly deployable, support reduced TCO compared to traditional datacenter platforms, and that will offer predictable cost and performance modeling to potential customers. Using Vblock for the infrastriucture components, the datacenter will be running on a single version of VMware vSphere and supporting something on the order of 350 applications and 6 petabytes of data storage (using EMCs storage hardware and virtualization technologies).
While a working, production facility supporting EMC’s private cloud, the datacenter will also be used to showcase the EMC cloud technologies and to provide the ability to demonstrate proof-of-concept operations to potential buyers of EMC technologies. Partner technologies such as those from Vblock, VMware and others will be demonstrated for customers, as well. The full range of EMC technologies will be on display, from storage to security, and analystics to documentation, all in use and all available to be demonstrated in the area of best practices and to provide that ‘see, it works” experience for potential EMC customers.
