Test Drive the Cloud Experience Center!

hybridcloudEach new release of the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud comes with an accompanying set of solution collateral – white papers, solution guides, and reference architecture guides – to provide a deep dive into the features, mechanics, and componentry of the solution.

This latest release of the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution also includes the Cloud Experience Center, an interactive-demo portal that shows you firsthand how a cloud environment works – how it looks, what it does, how it directly impacts business agility and IT value.

What Is the Cloud Experience Center?

We designed and built the Cloud Experience Center to serve as a companion to the solution collateral. White papers and solution guides tell you how a cloud works. The Cloud Experience Center shows you.

cloudexperience With its fully realistic interface and broad selection of interactive demos, the Cloud Experience Center is a high-value, high-touch tool, making it easy and quick for cloud users to test drive the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud.

And to enhance the experience even further, we added some bells and whistles to the portal to make it even more valuable.

We’ve specifically built it to bring the solution guides to life – to show you firsthand how it works, so you can experience it for yourself. You’ll see an interactive demo portal that works anywhere, on anything.

  • You can access and run it online from any platform – Windows, Mac, iOS, Android
  • You can download and run it offline

You can save the entire demo library to a thumb drive for easy distribution and sharing

Whatever terrain you want to explore – Infrastructure-as-a-Service, application and database management, data protection – there are fully interactive demos that will let you experience any or all of it. We’ve made it easy for you to take the wheel!

And to provide more perspective to the breadth of uses, experiences, and value that cloud can provide, the Cloud Experience Center has been set up using a menu-based portal, with use cases built around three distinct user profiles:

  • Cloud Administrator
  • Business Analyst
  • Developer

hybridcloudEach of these user profiles comes complete with its own unique, customized Service Catalog, an Items page for viewing and managing that user’s provisioned workloads (VMs and applications), a Requests page for tracking current and past cloud service and workload request submissions, and a specific set of demos for that profile.

Taken together, these profiles and demos give you a driver’s-seat view of what’s possible with the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud.

If it’s your preference to read some of the tech docs before you test drive, you can check them out here. However, if you want to jump right in, we’ve got an impressive (and ever-growing) library of hands-on demos, the Cloud Experience Center lets you experience broader capabilities than a vLab session can support, such as:

·       Database-as-a-Service

·       Remote workload provisioning to vCloud Air

·       Converged infrastructure management

·       Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service

·       CloudLink VM Encryption

·       Application Security and Load Balancing with NSX

·       Third-party integration solutions, such as ServiceNow

No Registration Required

The Cloud Experience Center is open to literally anybody – NO registration required, period! Whether you’re an existing customer or evaluating EMC solutions and products for the first time, you can connect directly to the Cloud Experience Center’s landing page and take it for a spin.

Getting Started with Your Demo

hybridcloudGetting started is easy! The clickable demos in the Cloud Experience Center are all set up to run in any of three modes, which can be toggled on and off from either the main menu or the use-case menu:

  • Auto-Drive with Virtual SE
  • Self-Drive with Virtual SE
  • Self-Drive without Virtual SE

The first of these options is essentially a click-through demo. Click the demo you want to see, and you’ll automatically advance through all the steps of the use case while the virtual SE explains the context and purpose of each step. All you have to do is click.

In the second mode, the virtual SE continues to explain the action, but you’ll actually need to click on the appropriate button, tab, or field to advance, with the virtual SE guiding you through the steps.

Finally, turning off both the Auto Drive and the Virtual SE means you’re experiencing the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud just as you would in an actual self-service portal.

Simple Point-and Click Navigation Options Let You Choose Where to Go

Our goal was to make the Cloud Experience Center easy to navigate, and to get you to the content you’re looking for quickly. We included simple navigation hints to help guide you:

  • A MENU button at the midpoint of the left edge of the screen, which brings you right back to the demo menu.
  • Use the MENU button at any point during any demo to toggle the virtual SE and Auto-Drive modes on or off, and then you’ll be returned back to your demo right where you left it by closing the Menu window.
  • The download link and a feedback link are in the lower-left corner of the screen. The Download link will let you pull down the entire Cloud Experience Center, in the form of a .zip file, which you can then save to a thumb drive for offline access.

The Feedback link is for us: if you see something that isn’t working, or isn’t accurate, or is out of date, use that link to let us know. Your feedback is always welcome! And check back often: we’ll update the Cloud Experience Center with new use cases – as quickly as we’re able to produce them.

Click HERE to start your test drive now!

About the Author: James Walkenhorst