UPDATED 09:00 EDT / AUGUST 30 2013

Chad Sakac, VP of Global SE at EMC NEWS

EMC’s Role in VMware’s Storage Future | #VMworld

Chad Sakac, VP of Global SE at EMCSince EMC’s acquisition of VMware in 2004, much has been said about the relationship between the two companies. How does a company react when its subsidiary partners with competition? Does EMC always have the inside track on VMware? Hosts of the CUBE, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman had the opportunity to talk with Chad Sakac, SVP of Global SE at EMC regarding this and the future of storage as it relates to virtualization.

VMware’s innovation continues to push the envelope and keep customers happy, Sakac explained, and its change in vSphere 5.5 to support vswitch  was an example of that innovation. Now, VMware is doing the same thing in storage, using control abstraction with VASA and also making its own dent in the storage market with VSAN, software-defined shared storage for virtual machines.

Hyper automation is the name of the game, he explained. The dream of a software-defined data center is to try to make the infrastructure invisible. Virtualization has solved this problem with compute. In storage, we need to get to the point where a person does not have to go to a storage person and ask for storage but rather the storage people provision the technology, make its features available in a catalog, and the VM can just grab those features as needed automatically.

Sakac said it will take time for VSAN to mature. From the EMC standpoint, there may be areas where it does not have a strong product to support customer needs, so the people at EMC are happy for customers who need something like VSAN, especially those who work with VMware. If they work with something else, such as KVM, Xen, or other virtualization technologies, they may need other storage solutions.

When asked about EMC and VMware’s relationship when it comes to working with competition and favoring each other for financial vs. technical purposes, Sakac said both sides must resist the urge to simplify for internal purposes and create vendor lock-in for the customers. Instead, they must always fight for the customers independently, looking after their needs above all else. Innovation cannot be stopped, he said, and in the end it is all good for the customers.

See the full interview with Sakac below:


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