EMC Stacking Its Chips Cloud High

EMC is preparing itself for a coming war for the run of corporate data centers.

EMC has steadily added by acquisition or internal development a range of tools allowing customers to manage access to content, storage capacity and infrastructure availability. The company also owns more than 90% 84% of VMware, the market leader in server virtualization, a hot technology touted as a way for customers to get more out of their hardware by consolidating multiple virtual machines onto fewer physical servers.

Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of EMC's IT management software group, told me that the company is gearing its entire strategy around this technology. "All of our tools are meant to exploit [virtualization] -- our storage, servers, network and even into the application world."

EMC expects that many large customers will continue to operate their own data centers, even as they subscribe to cloud-based data centers and applications offered by the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and Google, giving them the flexibility to add or subtract capacity as needed -- without investing in more hardware. But they will need tools to manage the flow of information between their in-house data centers and the ones they rent, as well as monitor capacity, manage permissions and perform all the other functions in the cloud as they do with their physical infrastructure.

Adding to this complexity, customers are likely to be managing virtualized data centers on premise as well as in the cloud. According to Gahagan, "the added complexity of managing that extra layer returns much greater cost savings than the cost of the complexity." Take his word for it or not -- it's what all the platform vendors are saying, and EMC wants to be at the center of the action.

Gahagan told me that EMC, VMware and Cisco are together creating a "best of breed" system with a view of owning the entire data center. "You'll see announcements between the three of us soon that suggest we believe these things to be true," he told me.

That's why EMC was as visible as it was when Cisco introduced its Unified Computing System vision of the data center last month. In a sign of things to come, Cisco also said it was getting in the business of selling servers because, apparently, Dell, Sun, HP and IBM servers aren't good enough. All the platform vendors preach interoperability and heterogeneity, code for grudgingly allowing their systems to work with those of other vendors, because they know that's what customers want to hear; most large enterprise data centers include a hodgepodge of Sun, HP, IBM and Dell servers running Unix and Windows operating systems, and the last thing customers want to hear is that they have to replace some of them with something else. But the vendors are all positioning themselves to deliver just that message.