EMC’s January 18, 2011, storage announcement—the first of this big data era—is one of its broadest ever. It includes over 40 new products and touches most of the company’s traditional platform lines, from Symmetrix at the mission critical high end to a new midrange architecture that further evolves EMC’s flagship offerings in the sweet-spot of the market. Today’s announcement also demonstrates both steady improvements and new capabilities within EMC’s relatively new Backup and Recovery Systems (BRS) division. In addition, the announcement included a surprise in the form of the VNXe, a brand new platform that dramatically simplifies enterprise-class storage to a level not previously seen by EMC customers.

What does this announcement say about EMC’s product strategy?

It says that despite “big picture” marketing campaigns from EMC and its competitors (e.g., virtualization, private clouds, unified storage), EMC is emphasizing technology advances that provide real, tactical benefits to customers and minimize disruption to the installed base. This announcement underscores that EMC’s broad portfolio is not consolidating; rather, it is expanding to include core products and new entrants such as the VNXe. In addition, EMC’s aggressive acquisition strategy means that customers can expect continued diversity in the product line—as seen with new Data Domain capabilities for backup, recovery and archiving; and in the not-too-distant future with new scale out NAS offerings from the Isilon acquisition.

The bottom line from a product standpoint is that EMC is developing new capabilities to target growth opportunities (e.g., SMB/ROBO, archiving), while at the same time co-opting many of the industry’s recent innovations around simplicity and automation—making them features of products within its large portfolio.

What does the announcement mean to storage users?

There are several major takeaways from this announcement from a customer perspective that involve technology dislocations and changes to the nature of storage competition going forward; specifically:

• Transforming skill sets. The consumerization of IT trend continues unabated. Virtualization, automation and self-service are at the center of the response from traditional IT companies such as EMC. The mandate for delivering IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) requires simpler IT and on-demand models are becoming compulsory. This is leading to a generalization of IT skills versus decades of emphasis on specialized technical capabilities, particularly at the lower end of the market. The VNXe announcement underscores this trend and is an excellent example of a simplified storage platform developed for generalists in the SMB space, not storage specialists. In a different way, flash storage and FAST VP is simplifying and automating the movement of data between storage tiers, freeing administrators to work on more strategic tasks.
• A changing storage hierarchy. While the storage industry always delivers more capacity, technology is shifting in non-traditional ways. We’re seeing a major move toward flash-based architectures (versus disk-only systems) and a continuance of the narrowing of tape use cases. The adoption of technologies such as FAST VP and the Data Domain Archiver are examples of products attempting to capitalize on these shifts and users must plan for increased flash exploitation throughout the storage hierarchy. As well, disk is increasingly attractive in use cases beyond primary storage and will continue to steadily encroach on tape.
• Innovation through software. EMC and many other firms are betting the ranch on commodity hardware based on Intel platforms. The nature of competition in storage is shifting from hardware to software. Increases in functionality used to require major hardware upgrades and big platform announcements. While bigger, better faster hardware will continue to ship, functional updates through software will be the primary value domain of storage companies. Indeed, the vast majority of value in today’s announcements (specifically)—and storage
• announcements generally—involve lines of software code much more so than new hardware capabilities.

We are exiting a decade of rapid storage innovation where several VC-backed companies shipped products positioned to chip away at EMC’s core Symmetrix and CLARiiON product lines. 3PAR, Compellent, XIV, EqualLogic and LeftHand Networks all set out to offer enterprise-class features in a simplified package. This served as an important catalyst, lighting a competitive fire under EMC and pressing the industry leader to respond by including feature sets to facilitate simplified provisioning and storage management (e.g., thin provisioning and automated tiering).

Ironically, these companies are gone now as their intellectual property and businesses have been subsumed by larger companies. Meanwhile, EMC remains the #1 supplier of external storage systems from a revenue perspective.

[Editor’s Note: This was cross-posted at Wikibon’s research repository. Dave Floyer and Dave Vellante collaborated on this post. You can read the full analysis on the Wikibon blog. Images credit Michael Sean Wright / SiliconANGLE. See more on SiliconANGLE’s photo flipbook. –mrh]