There are rumors swirling that EMC will shortly announce a so-called “Unified Storage” platform. The Register’s Chris Mellor broke a story in March about a converged platform from EMC where he said:

“EMC is about to converge its CLARiiON and Celerra arrays into a new V-CX product, according to a pair of sources with knowledge of the situation. This will be presented as virtualised unified storage with new levels of VMware integration, the sources say.”

Maybe this is EMC’s strategy but we hear that feedback from the market (translation customers) says that while unification of block and file would be nice—they’re not willing to go there if it means sacrificing performance or scalability; period.

The fact is EMC has built its midrange business on these two attributes with a heavy dose of 5 9’s availability thrown in. While EMC may do some marketing around unification it would probably be better for customers if they just focus on their knitting and stay on the performance, scalability and high reliability curve without the marketing hype.

Unified {fill in the blank} could be a bad image.  Look no further than the Unified Communications market a market far from unified.