EMC
MESSAGING AND
COLLABORATION
AS A SERVICE
Solution Brief
AT A GLANCE
•EMC® Messaging and Collaboration as a Service (MCaaS) leverages EMC VPLEX®, VNX®, Isilon®,
Atmos®, VMware vCloud Director,
and Zimbra Collaboration Server
•Benefits
•Reduces storage costs by 40
percent using object and unified
storage as well as federated storage access
•Maximizes the use of purchased
infrastructure
•Requires lower up-front expenditure through pay-as-you-grow and
simplified scaling as customers
adopt additional components
•Supports a business plan with
aggressive per-mailbox pricing
•Brings predictability to ongoing
enterprise messaging and collaboration investments
•Provides the low recovery point
objective (RPO) and recovery time
objective (RTO) customers need
Cloud service lets enterprise users collaborate
at a significantly lower cost per mailbox
Increased mobility and the proliferation of devices offering anywhere,
anytime access to enterprise data are
challenging traditional on-premise
messaging and collaboration solutions. In response to this evolution,
messaging and collaboration are
often among the first technologies
that organizations look to migrate to
the cloud. As a vital enterprise service, email is mission critical, while
collaboration contributes significantly
to the productivity of an increasingly
dispersed workforce.
As a result of this shift towards mobility and edge devices, enterprises
are seeking a flexible, on-demand
messaging solution, without having
to purchase, configure and manage
messaging infrastructure.
Figure 1.
Top Cloud Workloads—EMC
primary study by TNS, 2012
While this shift is underway, enterprises are also demanding higher-uptime then in-house solutions can
deliver, while supporting ubiquitous
access. Messaging and collaboration as a service offerings can be
an attractive alternative to enterprise-owned and maintained infrastructure.
According to Forrester, the size of the
collaboration services market reached
$42 billion in 2012, with a CAGR of
8% through 2018. Forrester also
estimates that cloud-based solutions
will represent 35% of the total collaboration services market by 2018.
In a recent EMC survey, almost half
of all respondents identified email
and collaboration as a top cloud
workload (Fig. 1).
Service providers interested in taking advantage of the opportunity to
offer messaging and collaboration as
a service face several challenges, including entrance into a marketplace
with established competitors and
aggressive price points.
So, in order to compete successfully,
service providers must offer a competitively priced solution that lets
them enter the market quickly, at an
acceptable up-front investment with
predictable on-going costs, all built
upon a scalable platform.
MESSAGING AND COLLABORATION
as a Service
While the economics of messaging
and collaboration as a service may be
clear to enterprise customers, in order
to successfully compete in the MCaaS
market a service provider solution
demands an architecture that
•Supports a business plan with aggressive pricing
•Provides the recovery point objective
(RPO) and recovery time objective
(RTO) required by customers
•Scales up as customers purchase additional components for the solution
The EMC mcAAS SOLUTION
The EMC MCaaS solution Integrates
best in class messaging through Zimbra Collaboration Server; virtualization and orchestration with VMware
vCloud Director; a unified storage
platform through EMC VNX; a scaleout object storage platform with EMC
Atmos or EMC Isilon; and a storage
federation solution, using EMC
VPLEX with RecoverPoint, to create a
fully virtualized scale-out messaging
solution. The result is cost savings
through a scale-out architecture and
effective resource utilization.
Major components of the solution
include
•Zimbra—the messaging and collaboration platform
•VMware vCloud Director—the multitenant virtualized environment
•EMC Atmos, or EMC Isilon—the
scale-out message blob storage
•EMC VNX—the host for the virtualized environment images and workloads, as well as all the non-email
blob Zimbra storage requirements
•EMC VPLEX—the scale-out architecture for the unified storage aspects
of the solution
Zimbra COLLABORATION SERVER
Now in it’s 8th generation, this
email, calendar and collaboration
solution has a history of development and optimization under VMware. Zimbra Collaboration Server
(ZCS) provides an open platform
designed for virtualization and
portability across private and public
clouds, making it easier to manage
and more cost-effective to scale.
With the most innovative web
application available, ZCS boosts
end-user productivity on any device
or desktop—any time, any place—at
lower costs than other providers.
Versions of ZCS include a network
edition, an open-source edition, and
a prepackaged virtual appliance.
VMware vcloud director
VMware vCloud Director lets customers build secure, multi-tenant, hybrid
clouds by pooling infrastructure
resources into virtual data centers
and enabling those resources to be
consumed on demand by tenants or
users.
Key features of vCloud Director
include
•Virtual data centers
•Multi-tenant environments
•vCloud networking and security
technologies
•Infrastructure service catalog
•Self-service portal
•VMware vCloud API and Open Virtualization Format
•Automation and orchestration
It is possible to directly integrate
VNX block storage through VMware
vSphere into a vCloud Director
environment. However, for Atmos,
a Linux Installable File System (IFS)
driver is used to enable access to
the Atmos file system from the guest
operating systems.
Figure 2.
vCloud Director architecture
EMC ATMOS
EMC Atmos enables the efficient
storage, management, and aggregation of vast amounts of data across
geographically dispersed locations,
through a single pane of glass for a
common view and central management.
Figure 3.
Physical architecture of the MCaaS solution
With EMC Atmos, service providers
can add capacity, applications, locations or tenants to their cloud with
zero need to develop or reconfigure,
thereby reducing administration time
and ensuring availability.
In a multi-tenant environment, EMC
Atmos allows service providers to
meter capacity, bandwidth, and
usage across tenants while enabling
users to self-manage and access
storage.
EMC Isilon
The Isilon storage used in this solution leverages its scale-out simplicity
to easily support massively large
email and collaboration storage
requirements, without incurring the
downtime and cost of migration.
Isilon was designed to
•Lower costs with faster deployment
•Support simplified scalability
•Reduce risk with a highly resilient
architecture
Isilon also offers unmatched simplicity, efficiency, flexibility, and
reliability, letting service providers
scale both capacity and performance
almost instantly to meet customer-specific business needs—with no
additional IT burden.
EMC VNX
The VNX family of storage arrays is
designed to deliver maximum performance and scalability, enabling
private and public cloud providers
to grow, share, and cost-effectively
manage multi-protocol file and block
systems. EMC VNX series storage is
powered by Intel processors for intelligent storage that automatically and
efficiently scales in performance,
while ensuring data integrity and
security.
EMC vplex
Take advantage of federated access-anywhere technology that creates a high-availability infrastructure
across two arrays or geographically
disperse data centers, with unmatched resiliency and active-active
data access, eliminating planned
and unplanned downtime.
Implementing a distributed virtualization layer to simplify and manage
geographically distributed Fibre
Channel (FC) based storage area networks (SANs), EMC VPLEX provides
•Mobility—to move applications,
virtual machines, and data within
and between data centers without
impacting users.
•Availability—for non-stop data access by replicating across locations.
•Collaboration—for remote user
access to synchronized data in real
time across multiple data centers.
•Access-Anywhere—for a consistent view of data that is presented,
shared, accessed, or relocated
between VPLEX clusters.
•Scale-Out Cluster Architecture—to
start small and grow with predictable
service levels on a foundation of
scalable, highly available processor
engines.
Figure 4.
Each tenant of the MCaaS solution is contained within their own isolated vCloud Director organization
•Supports a business plan with aggressive per-mailbox pricing
•Brings predictability to ongoing enterprise messaging and collaboration
investments
•Provides the low recovery point
objective (RPO) and recovery time
objective (RTO) customers need
In this solution, VPLEX is implemented between the virtualization layer
(vSphere) and the physical layer
(VNX) to simplify the management
of local storage and to enable the
improvement of the solution’s availability by adding storage hosted at a
remote data center.
Conclusion
A mobile workforce and the proliferation of edge devices has challenged
organizations to adopt a messaging
and collaboration solution that better
addresses the evolving needs of the
enterprise than traditional on-premise solutions. As a result, messaging
and collaboration are often among
the first services organizations look to
migrate to the cloud.
With the EMC MCaaS solution, service providers can deliver a flexible,
on-demand messaging infrastructure
that addresses the performance
needs of enterprises, while satisfying investment requirements and
cost savings through a scale-out
architecture and efficient resource
utilization.
The EMC Messaging and Collaboration
as a Service solution
•Reduces storage costs by 40 percent
using object and unified storage as
well as federated storage access
EMC offerings in backup and recovery, enterprise content management,
unified storage, big data, enterprise
storage, data federation, archiving,
security, and deduplication help
customers move to and build IT trust
in their next generation of information management, enabling them to
offer IT-as-a-Service as part of their
journey to cloud computing.
Learn More
To find out how EMC products, services, and proven solutions can help
solve your business and IT challenges, contact your local representative,
authorized reseller, or visit us at
www.EMC.com.
•Maximizes the use of purchased
infrastructure
•Requires lower up-front expenditure
through pay-as-you-grow and simplified scaling as customers adopt
additional components
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States and other countries. VMware and Site Recovery Manager are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States
and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All
Rights Reserved. Published in the USA. 05/13 Solution Brief H12047
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EMC Corporation
Hopkinton, MA 01748-9103
1-508-435-1000 In North America 1-866-464-7381
www.EMC.com