Category Archives: EMC

EMC, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis

EMC announces new protection for data as cloud hybrids become the norm

Storage vendor EMC has created a new product range to protect data as it moves in and out of the various parts of a hybrid cloud.

On Tuesday it announced news products and services designed to integrate primary storage and data protection systems across private and public clouds. The aim is to combine the flexibility of public cloud services with the control and security of a private cloud infrastructure.

The new offerings carry out one of three functions, characterised as tiering data across diverse storage infrastructures, protecting data in transit to and from the Cloud and protecting data once its static in the cloud.

EMC says that by integrating its VMAX systems through new improvements to its FAST.X tiering systems it can make it cheaper for customers to prioritise their storage according to the expense of the medium. The new additions to the management system have now automated the tiering of public clouds and cater for both EMC and non-EMC storage systems.

The new levels of protection for data, as it travels in and out of the cloud, is provided by

CloudBoost 2.0. This, claims EMC, will work with EMC’s Data Protection Suite and Data Domain so that private cloud users can move data safely to the cheaper media in the public cloud for long-term data retention.

Once resident in the public cloud, data can be better protected now as a result of new Spanning product features, which can cater for different regional conditions across the European Union. Spanning Backup for Salesforce now offers better SaaS data restoration options so it’s easier restore lost or deleted data. Spanning’s new European data destination option will also aid compliance with European data sovereignty laws and regulations. Meanwhile, the Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) offering for private clouds now has better capacity management, secure multi-tenancy and a dense shelf configuration that EMC says will ‘dramatically’ cut the cost of ownership.

Meanwhile, EMC also announced a new generation of its NetWorker data protection software.  NetWorker 9 has a new universal policy engine to automate and simplify data protection regardless of where the data resides.

“Tiering is critical to business in our own data centres,” said Arrian Mehis, general manager of VMware Cloud practice at Rackspace, “and in the data centres of our customers.”

ENDS

acqusition, Dell, EMC, M&A, News & Analysis

Funding of Dell EMC acquisition could scupper deal – report

Dell office logoDell’s $67 billion merger with storage giant EMC could raise a tax challenge that would make their integration unfeasible, according to a re/code report. But the difficulties may be reflected across the industry as cloud drives future convergence, according to one analyst.

Deal’s funding of the EMC takeover, by using a new type of stock share, is under regulatory review and could lead to a $9 billion tax bill. The tax logic is built on the success enjoyed by EMC’s investment in the software vendor VMware, whose value rose by ‘tens of billions of dollars’ after EMC acquired it in 2003.

Dell plans to offer EMC shareholders $33.15 a share for the company, with $24.05 in cash and the balance from tracking stock linked to VMware. EMC owns an 81% stake in VMware. The tracking stock would offset the debt Dell would otherwise be burdened with and help Dell avoid tax.

But the scheme is likely to be reviewed by federal regulators who may revise he tax burden as high as $9 billion, according to the report’s sources.

It reports that Dell management are trying to ensure that key aspects of the deal don’t qualify for the level of transaction tax that would make the merger fail. Dell has reportedly hired the New York firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett to influence events in Dell’s favour.

The deal isn’t off, yet, but Dell’s funding options are a bit brazen, said analyst Clive Longbottom at Quocrica. “Dell would do better to sell 61% of the VMware shares direct to the market instead,” said Longbottom.

Making VMware a totally separate business would bring in $20 billion, would be totally legal and result in a much lower tax bill,” said Longbottom. The wider issue for the cloud industry, he said, is the scale of consolidation that is being driven by the cloud and the measures to which companies are big forced to finance them. “These tracking shares worry me. It seems to be a case of smoke and mirrors,” said Longbottom.

“This was never going to be an easy deal and Michael Dell has already stated that it will be a minimum of 9 months before it can close. It then comes down to whether the US government decides that having EMC and Dell survive is a good thing and whether other vendors are also happy for the government to allow this to happen.”

Dell, EMC, Financing, IPO, News & Analysis, Pivotal, Silver Lake

EMC Dell in rush to go public with Pivotal in early 2016

Dell office logoSoftware company Pivotal could be subject to an initial public offering (IPO) in early 2016, according to web site Recode, which claims to quote sources at parent company EMC involved in planning the launch. The IPO is being pushed forward to take place before the Dell acquisition of EMC goes ahead next year, with the anticipated billions raised to be used to service debt.

Big data analysis specialist Pivotal made $227 million in revenue in 2014 but posted a $106 million operating loss on revenue of $118 million for the first half of 2015, according EMC’s filed reports.

Pivotal’s joint owners, EMC and GE, are to offer a minority stake in the software company to public shareholders, says the report. This would be a repeat of a tactic previously used by EMC when it sold 19% of its shares in VMware in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in 2007. Sources expect EMC is planning to sell around 20% of its Pivotal shares but retain the rest.

The plan involves Pivotal filing for its IPO confidentially under the auspices of the US Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, with the IPO concluded before the proposed $67 billion acquisition of EMC by computing giant Dell.

Both EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Dell CEO Michael Dell have supported the idea for a Pivotal IPO in the past. Speculators say the IPO may have been expedited because it would help to pay off some of the estimated $50 billion debt that Dell will have once the EMC takeover closes. A successful Pivotal IPO could potentially raise billions in new capital.

Meanwhile new capital from the Pivotal IPO would supplement some of the funding lost by the decline in VMware shares since the Dell-EMC deal was announced. In August, VMware shares were around $90 each but since the Dell-EMC deal was announced, their price has fallen by a third to $60.15.

Spokespeople for Dell, EMC and Silver Lake, the private equity firm that co-owns Dell, declined to comment.

EMC, Enterprise IT, Networks, News & Analysis, Virtustream, VMware

EMC, VMware unveil plans for Virtustream hybrid for the enterprise cloud

EMC and VMware are to combine their cloud offerings under a jointly-owned 50/50 shared Virtustream brand led by its CEO Rodney Rogers.

The cloud service will be aimed at enterprises with an emphasis on hybrid cloud, which Virtustream’s owners identify as one of the largest markets for IT infrastructure spending. The company will provide managed services for on-premises infrastructure and its enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform. The rationale is to help clients make the transition from on-premise computing to the cloud, migrating their applications to cloud-based IT environments. Since many applications are mission critical, hybrid cloud environments will be instrumental in the conversion process and Virtustream said it will set out to provide a public cloud experience for its Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud service.

Nearly one-third of all IT infrastructure spending is going to cloud-related technologies, according to a research by The 451 Group, with cloud service buyers now investing on the application stack. Enterprise adoption is increasing, says the researcher, and buyers increasingly favour private and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is increasingly being run on cloud systems, and enterprises will spend a total of $41.2B annually on ERP software by 2020, says The 451 Group.

Virtustream will incorporate EMC Information Infrastructure, VCE and VMware into one and will offer services using VMware vCloud Air, VCE Cloud Managed Services, Virtustream’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service and EMC’s Storage Managed Services and Object Storage Services offerings. VMware will establish a Cloud Provider Software business unit led by VMware’s senior VP Ajay Patel. The unit will incorporate existing VMware cloud management offerings and Virtustream’s software assets.

The business will integrate existing on-premises EMC Federation private cloud and take them into the public cloud, according to Virtustream. The aim is to maintain a common experience for developers, managers, architects and end users. Virtustream’s cloud services will be delivered directly to customers and through partners.

Virtustream addresses the changes in buying patterns and IT cloud operation models that both vendors are encountering now, said EMC CEO Joe Tucci. “Customers consistently tell us they’re on IT journeys to the hybrid cloud. The EMC Federation is now positioned as a complete provider of hybrid cloud offerings.”

Virtustream’s financial results will be consolidated into VMware’s financial statements beginning in Q1 2016.

acquisition, Datacentre, Dell, EMC, hybrid cloud, M&A, News & Analysis, VMware

Dells finds $67 billion to acquire EMC and create cloud giant

Dell office logoAs extensively leaked PC and server outfit Dell today announced it will be acquiring storage giant EMC for $67 billion to create a leading player in the datacentre and cloud industries.

Dell is privately held by founder Michael Dell and VCs MSD Partners and Silver Lake. The combined company will remain private, while VMWare, which is majority owned by EMC will remain separate and publicly traded. This deal is the biggest tech M&A deal of all time and the resulting company will be one of the world’s largest privately held ones. Dell only cost $25 billion to take private, so it’s asking for a big contribution from its equity partners.

As with any massive M&A scale and efficiencies will be major strategic benefits, but the two companies were also keen to stress how much they complement each other, with Dell strongest in the SMB and public sector markets while EMC’s strongest area is blue-chip corporates. In terms of product portfolio the narrative inevitably refers frequently to end-to-end solutions and that sort of thing.

“The combination of Dell and EMC creates an enterprise solutions powerhouse bringing our customers industry leading innovation across their entire technology environment,” said Michael Dell. “Our new company will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security.

“Our investments in R&D and innovation along with our privately-controlled structure will give us unmatched scale, strength and flexibility, deepening our relationships with customers of all sizes. I am incredibly excited to partner with the EMC, VMware, Pivotal, VCE, RSA and Virtustream teams and am personally committed to the success of our new company, our customers and partners.”
“I’m tremendously proud of everything we’ve built at EMC – from humble beginnings as a Boston-based startup to a global, world-class technology company with an unyielding dedication to our customers,” said Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC. “But the waves of change we now see in our industry are unprecedented and, to navigate this change, we must create a new company for a new era. I truly believe that the combination of EMC and Dell will prove to be a winning combination for our customers, employees, partners and shareholders.”
It’s not difficult to spot the customary synergies in this deal. When Dell went private it was primarily to allow a complete strategic overhaul away from the voracious quarterly demands of Wall Street. Fundamentally it wanted to move out of the highly commoditised PC market on which it was founded in the 80s, and into core enterprise IT sectors such as servers.

EMC has been in the enterprise data storage game for even longer, is been threatened by pure play cloud providers and needs to move with the times. Just as with Dell, EMC seems to be betting that removing the rabid short-termism that comes with being a public company will allow it the space to do that and, assuming MSD and Silver Lake remain patient the new company should be able to innovate and compete well in the cloud, virtualization and IoT worlds.

“We are excited and honoured to invest in the outstanding businesses built by Joe Tucci and his world-class management team,” said Egon Durban, managing partner of Silver Lake. “We believe the strategic integration of EMC and Dell will generate unparalleled depth and breadth across servers, storage, virtualization and the next era of converged infrastructure, creating a global technology platform poised for sustained long term growth and innovation in the years to come. We are doubling down and increasing our investment in this differentiated market leader for the next paradigm of enterprise computing.”

The plan is for Michael Dell to run the whole company and Tucci to move on when the deal is done. A deal this size will take a while to get approval and complete, so nothing concrete will happen for a few months yet. But when it does, the cloud market will hopefully be more competitive than ever.

Dell, EMC, M&A, News & Analysis, Storage, VMware

Dell said to be considering EMC acquisition

Dell serversComputing giant Dell is in advanced talks to buy storage company EMC according to a WSJ report, citing the inevitable people familiar with the matter.

A full acquisition seems unlikely since EMC is around double the size of Dell if you compare its $50 billion market cap with the $25 billion is cost to take Dell private. More probable would be for Dell to keep just the storage part of EMC, while spinning off VMware, which is mostly owned by EMC.

Another report from Re/code, which was itself acquired from the WSJ by Vox Media earlier this year, insists only the storage part of EMC has ever been on the table. It also makes the point that Dell would have to add significantly to its current debt pile of $12 billion to fund any deal.

If this move did go ahead it would set a new record for the value of tech-only M&A, topping the $37 billion Avago is paying for Broadcom. Dell is increasingly been moving towards enterprise IT, and away from PCs, since it was taken private by its founder. It has often been outbid by the likes of HP for in enterprise IT acquisitions in the past and EMC may be viewed as a relative bargain, having failed to recover its dotcom bubble highs.

EMC, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Virtualisation, VMware

VMware opens up at VMworld San Francisco

VMWare campus logoVirtualisation pioneer VMware has unveiled a raft of new services tailored for hybrid cloud services and open systems at its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco.

VMware announced the launch of VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.0, the company’s second release of its distribution of the OpenStack open-source cloud software. The new release, based on OpenStack Kilo, will be available on September 30.

“Customers can now upgrade from version one to version two in a more operationally efficient manner and even roll back if anything goes wrong,” said VMware product line manager Arvind Soni.

The move could be seen as a U-turn by VMware, whose revenue streams come from sales of its vSphere virtualization software. The most recent annual VMware report warned that “open source technologies for virtualization, containerization, and cloud platforms such as Xen, KVM, Docker, Rocket, and OpenStack provide significant pricing competition and let competing vendors [use] OpenStack to compete directly with our SDDC initiative.”

However, with OpenStack distributions available from Canonical, HP, Huawei and Oracle – and investment in OpenStack companies from Intel, IBM and other major players, VMware has announced continued support. In October 2014 parent company EMC bought three OpenStack start ups – Cloudscaling, Maginatics and Spanning – to provide a variety of cloud services which adhere to the increasingly popular open standard.

Meanwhile, testing and running disaster recovery plans will be quicker, promises VMWare, now its vCloud Air service has a new cloud-based Site Recovery Manager. The service is now offered on a pay-per-use basis, replacing the more expensive annual subscriptions.

In the event of a disaster recovery event or test, fees will be charged for each virtual machine protected and the storage they consume, said VMware.

Storage could get cheaper as VMware has introduced vCloud Air Object Storage on the Google Cloud Platform. The debut product from VMware’s new Google reseller relationship will be available from September 30th, which will also see an alternative offering launched: vCloud Air Object Storage service, powered by EMC.

The start of the fourth financial quarter should also see VMware release its new vCloud Air SQL database as a service, as the virtualisation vendor looking to match the breadth of features offered the cloud industry’s top service providers.

With a new Hybrid Cloud Manager, VMware aims to help clients to migrate workloads, extend the range of their data centres and fine tune the process of juggling resources between private and public clouds. The management takes place through the interface of VMware’s vSphere Web Client, and will support the migration of virtual machines.

Andy Tait, EMC, News & Analysis, Public Sector, VMware

Cost, flexibility driving UK public sector to cloud

The UK public sector is warming to cloud

The UK public sector is warming to cloud

A recent survey of over 600 UK decision makers suggests over three quarters (85 per cent) of UK public sector employees are using some form of public cloud services.

The VMware-sponsored research sheds some light on adoption drivers, with cost savings looking like the most frequently cited. More than a third of respondents (34 per cent) said affordability was the main reason for choosing to buy cloud services in their department, followed by ease of use (23 per cent).

“The findings from this research are very positive for the public sector. Line of businesses are using public cloud services to drive efficiencies across the organisation – both for employees to access data inside the organisation, and to speed the delivery of citizen-focused services, for example passport applications, that fluctuate at times throughout the year,” said Andy Tait, head of public sector strategy, VMware.

While cloud services aren’t always cheaper than their legacy alternatives it is perhaps unsurprising that affordability is one of the leading drivers of cloud uptake in the public sector given increased budgetary pressure and savings requirements being placed on departments.

Still, the research highlights a growing IT security issue. The survey results show just under two-thirds of (60 per cent) of public sector respondents use some form of public cloud services, whether offered by IT or not.

“In order for the UK public sector to drive efficiencies in a secure, flexible, agile and compliant manner, business users need to look at embracing a hybrid cloud strategy that can provide portability of workloads, one set of management tools and deliver services such as disaster recovery and built in security – without the cost of having to investing in unnecessary resources and tools,” Tait said.

EMC, Joe Tucci, M&A, News & Analysis, Virtualisation, VMware

Report: EMC mulls selling itself to its subsidiary VMware

EMC might be selling itself to VMware in a move that could see the child become the parent

EMC might be selling itself to VMware in a move that could see the child become the parent

Storage giant EMC is reportedly considering a buyout by its virtualization-focused subsidiary, VMware, at the behest of activist investor Elliott Manage according to multiple reports.

The deal according to Re/Code, which first reported the news, would work like this: VMware would issue between $50bn and $55bn in new share, with about $30bn going towards cancelling EMC’s stake in VMware, and the remaining shares in VMware issues to current EMC stakeholders.

While no deal has been agreed or confirmed by spokespeople at EMC, VMware and Elliott Management it is clear the EMC Federation is under increasing pressure to split up and drastically reorganize its operations, something that has been on the cards for a couple of years now amidst flat or declining revenues and a bloating portfolio of products and services.

Elliott has made no secret of its desire to see EMC balkanize the Federation – EMC, VMware and Pivotal – into autonomous entities with more streamlined product portfolios, much like its support of Citrix’s reorganization and divestiture(s).

The market’s reaction to the potential acquisition was mixed, with VMware’s share price dropping from $93.43 to $85.72 per share in the space of just over an hour after the news broke, levelling off at $86.65 per share by the close of trading yesterday. EMC shares, however, rose from about $25.93 per share to $27.05 during the same period, closing at $26.85.

A deal that would see EMC and VMware combine into one entity wouldn’t be too far fetched given EMC’s more recent acquisition streak – namely, software companies that bolster its software-defined storage and enterprise software capabilities. VMware, an embedded component of today’s datacenters, complements that strategy nicely, but with the news sending VMware’s share price downward it doesn’t seem the market favours the child becoming the parent.

In a call with analysts in July EMC chairman and chief executive Joe Tucci rejected the possibility of a split, but emphasized a transformation that puts cloud technology (like VMware’s) at its core.

“Undoubtedly everybody on this call believes deeply that one of the biggest transitions every company has to do is move to the cloud. We talked about digital transformation which I think is an even bigger market where the Internet of Things and all of that falls in. But just take where we live in datacentres. And datacentres are moving to cloud technologies, both private and managed.”

“Obviously, if you were doing that, would you rather do that as just VMware, just EMC, just Pivotal with their past or are you a lot stronger in front of a customer’s doing it together? So, do I think we’re much stronger? The answer is absolutely. So I think splitting this federation or spinning off VMware is not a good idea. I firmly believe that we are better together, a lot better together.”

Anne O’Leary, Cork Internet eXchange (CIX), EMC, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Orna Berry, Pivotal, vodafone

EMC, Vodafone partner on Internet of Things platform

EMC and Vodafone are teaming on a €2m IoT platform

EMC and Vodafone are teaming on a €2m IoT platform

Storage giant EMC is teaming up with Vodafone to develop and offer a platform for industrial Internet of Things (IoT) service development and testing.

The IoT development platform, known as Infinite, is spread across three datacentres – one hosted by EMC, another by Vodafone, and another by datacentre and cloud provider Cork Internet eXchange (CIX).

The companies said the platform can be used to develop a range of IoT services, particularly those to support industrial automation in fields like manufacturing and fleet management, but also healthcare and higher education.

EMC and Vodafone said the companies are investing about €2m in the initiative.

“EMC Federation is leading an industrial partnership encompassing rich data and Internet of Things. The digital age’s IT transformation – cloud, big data, social, mobile and Internet of Things, is continuously and increasingly changing the way we live and work,” said Orna Berry, corporate vice president innovation, EMC Centres of Excellences (CoE). “EMC Federation and Ireland’s CoE are excited to take a dynamic and influential part in this important eventuation, with the creation of the Infinite innovative IoT platform.”

This is also the first large scale project approved for use by the Industrial Internet Consortium, a membership group of telcos, research institutes and technology manufacturers created last year and focused on developing interoperability standards and common architectures to bridge smart devices, machines, mobile devices and the data they create.

The move means the offering adheres to a range of interoperability standards being proposed or consolidated by the group.

“Infinite will prove to be a valuable Industrial Internet testbed for a countless number of industries including smart cities and healthcare. As the need for more dynamic systems continues to grow, organisations will turn to utilising mobile networks to connect to virtual systems,” said Richard Soley, executive director of the Industrial Internet Consortium. “This testbed is going to prove the viability of doing all this with systems that require the utmost security – such as those used by hospitals and emergency medical services.”

Anne O’Leary, chief executive of Vodafone Ireland, said: “We are delighted to work with EMC in this exciting development. Vodafone is at the forefront of Internet of Things technology at a global level and I am proud to see Ireland also taking a lead in pioneering the development of these new disruptive technologies. IoT has the potential to transform business in Ireland and we are excited to be in a position to provide companies with access to start developing their own IoT services.”

With IoT heating up a broad range of IT and telecoms incumbents have thrown their hats into the development platform race. Last month for instance Google unveiled Brillo, a slimmed down version of Android with a  proprietary set of APIs for IoT-specific services and communications, while SAP unveiled a thinly re-branded version of HANA in the cloud for IoT. But while telcos have long tried to get in on this segment it seems to be an interesting move for EMC, which has generally kept a low profile in IoT beyond simply tailoring the marketing around its high-IO storage arrays, and has left much of the jockeying in this segment up to others in the Federation (like Pivotal).