by Sal Capizzi
EMC held its fall 2009 North American analyst summit on November 10th and 11th at its Franklin, MA facility.
As with all analyst conferences, the point is to disseminate vendor messages while getting feedback from analysts in order to avoid any missteps. There was no mistaking EMC’s messages this time around. The two overarching takeaways: 1) EMC is moving to the cloud; and 2) moving to the cloud is a journey. To say that EMC emphasized the word “journey” would be an understatement. In fact, all presenters managed to pepper their respective presentations with “journey”.
In fairness, getting to a cloud-type infrastructure is journey of sorts — definitely not a short term goal, even though several cloud offerings are available today. Although there was plenty of additional subject matter and some good detail in the suite of presentations, the common thread for all of them was support for cloud.
CEO Joe Tucci emphasized that EMC is a technology company focusing on IT infrastructure, that it will not become a services company, and that it does not plan to be in the business of selling applications. EMC will focus on enabling its partners to deliver the applications while it focuses on the infrastructure layers. With EMC’s reputation for providing high levels of services to its customers, it was somewhat surprising to hear that they claim not to be a services company. But as echoed by Howard Elias, EMC’s focus for providing services is totally in support of driving its sales at the infrastructure level.
EMC emphasized the private cloud (services to end users within the organization) as opposed the public cloud (services to customers outside the organization over the Internet, e.g., Mozy). And although cloud was certainly the common theme throughout all the presentations, EMC did a good job of putting the discussion in the right context in terms of integrating with the related, underlying technologies. Discussions about how virtualization, backup, security, and IT management would bring real cost saving advantages to customers in a cloud delivery system were pretty convincing. One thing that EMC does right is to frame its strategy around customer needs rather than competition.
None of this means success is a slam dunk for EMC. It’s reasonable to predict that the delivery of IT services through the cloud will be adopted widely by SMBs and some enterprises for specific applications, but if services are not executed properly the rate of adoption will stall and some vendors will stumble. The true test will be whether or not EMC and other vendors can actually deliver a reasonably manageable solution at real cost savings. Nevertheless, a major vendor like EMC getting behind the push for cloud will absolutely help drive customer adoption.
November 25th, 2009
The IBM Information Infrastructure Analyst Summit in Boston on October 6-7 was an opportunity to catch up on where IBM is going with its IT infrastructure strategy. Many of the plans we saw were quite crisp; others were less so.
Some things about meeting with IBM never seem to change: their slides, for instance, are always chock full of information… typically far more than the human eye can deal with. This makes them much better as reference documents than as presentation showpieces. Fortunately, the company is also very prompt at making softcopy of the slides available to the audience, a courtesy that other vendors ought to emulate.
Cloud and virtualization technologies have moved to the forefront for both servers and storage, and the meeting coincided with several announcements regarding cloud-based offerings: the IBM Information Archive, a private cloud storage offering (branded as the IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud) and a trio of cloud-related consulting offerings. Both services and products appear quite real, and are fully consistent with IBM’s stated intent to capture a larger slice of enterprise IT by adding cloud-based services to their mix of offerings. If the marketeers are going to do well by the technologists however, they will really have to crisp up their strategy. After all, these are early days for cloud computing and we have not passed the point where many of the most basic definitions regarding cloud are still up for grabs. This ought to be the sort of opportunity that gets the marketing juices flowing because it represents a terrific opportunity for industry leaders such as IBM to guide (or, less generously, to co-opt) the new terminology. Let the technical marketers work de jure standards through industry trade groups and standards associations; this is the point at which marketing departments can create de facto standards, and these are the ones that are the chief influence on buying decisions.
It was good to see that the company’s acquisition of Diligent about 18 months ago has gone well. Diligent’s ProtectTier dedup technology is beginning to penetrate several areas of IBM storage, so don’t be surprised to see deduplication extended well beyond VTLs and the backup and recovery process. If IBM gets it right, this will likely prove to be a significant differentiator for IBM when it comes to managing IT operations. Why? Because their dedup technology (a “single pass” approach, using a memory-resident index rather than a two-phase hash-based process that involves disk I/O) allows them to be in the data path, an option not be practical to other methods. This — in theory — lets them insert the process anywhere they want in any data path. Potentially — again, in theory — this is an opportunity to reduce both intramural and WAN data traffic.
I’ll be watching.
October 8th, 2009
Looking out the porthole of a cruise ship’s cabin only gives you a limited view of what’s going on, no matter how much money you have spent on the trip. Want to see what’s happening on the other side of the ship? Move to another porthole.
Managing storage has always had one thing in common with a cruise ship travel– and it sure isn’t the food. Admins have had to use different management consoles to run different aspects of their storage, a situation that emphasizes the status of many products as stand-alone applications that don’t necessarily play well together (even when those products come from the same company). Managing CDP, archiving, and remote replication typically means hopping between management interfaces as you move from tool to tool. But times are changing, and for the better.
CommVault has integrated a number of tools within a common interface, and yesterday (10/01/09) EMC announced that its new RecoverPoint 3.2 release (that’s the rebranded product they got from the Kasha acquisition 3-1/2 years ago) as a common management interface for all of RecoverPoint’s functionality, including CDP and local and remote replication.
Merging the management of all data protection products within a single console is surely a worthwhile goal, particularly if the products within that console truly interoperate with one another. Lacking industry standards for management interfaces and middleware, it’s likely such management screens will be proprietary for the most part. Still, companies like EMC which have a robust set of in-house management products and an equally robust ecosystem of third party products, are well-advised to keep their APIs open to make their management consoles even more useful in the future
October 3rd, 2009
