Transformation and disruption are two words heard frequently when describing the IT landscape. Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman and CEO, described these times as “unprecedented” and compared the new digital era to a giant wave bearing down on business which you can choose to be either on the good side or the bad side.
As a company EMC is not immune to these waves. We need to take the same advice that we give to our customers about the importance of transforming, staying agile, and disrupting to drive costs out of today’s business so we can invest in the future. Our Core Technologies storage and data protection launch at EMC World actually provides some insight into how and where EMC is transforming and disrupting ourselves.
XtremIO is transforming flash and the EMC storage portfolio. In the last 18 months, this product has experienced meteoric and historic growth to emerge as the #1 leader in the all flash array market. The XtremIO 4.0 announcement provides further proof through new software services and scalability that EMC expects to see more and more workloads consolidated on this platform.
For over 20 years Symmetrix, now VMAX, has been EMC’s flagship enterprise, mission critical storage platform. Today VMAX has been fundamentally transformed into the world’s first enterprise data services platform by separating the brains, i.e., services like SRDF, TimeFinder and ProtectPoint, from the brawn, i.e., storage layers like HDD and SSD. The introduction of FAST.X furthers the level of automation and SLO management by extending tiering to other storage devices including XtremIO and CloudArray. This is not just an interoperability story; this is delivering net new capabilities and value to any storage customer looking to optimize service levels, performance and cost.
Data protection continues transforming as the world copes with massive data growth and mobility. No longer as simple as making backups faster and more reliable, EMC continues to disrupt its own portfolio through software innovation including the new DD OS 5.6 and the new DD9500 system both pushing Data Domain beyond traditional capabilities of a Purpose-Built Backup Appliance (PBBA), to those of a high-performance, highly-scalable protection storage platform.
Changing how customers purchase and deploy backup and archive software, EMC continues to make the Data Protection Suite more compelling by adding search functionality and cloud enablement with CloudBoost, a new capability to send backups to the cloud courtesy of last year’s acquisition of Maginetics. And for those applications like Salesforce.com and Google Apps that live in the cloud, EMC’s other 2014 data protection acquisition, Spanning, extends support to Office 365.
Finally, there is ample evidence that EMC is leveraging the power of the portfolio across both storage and data protection by seamlessly delivering capabilities for RecoverPoint in XtremIO and increased application coverage for ProtectPoint with VMAX and Data Domain. Plus, we are continuing to move toward software-defined offerings like the new vVNX and the announcement of a project to deliver a software-only version of Data Domain.
Look this is not to say that EMC has everything perfectly figured out, or that it wouldn’t be a whole lot easier if we were just a one product company. These new products and capabilities will make a big difference to the tens of thousands of EMC customers who rely on our solutions. They are looking for practical, concrete steps to take so they can drive down their cost and complexity and build for the future. We get it, we are both trying to transform at an increasingly rapid pace and that means doing things differently so we can continue to deliver value to our customers. After all, as Joe might say, you can either ride the wave or get buried by it. Surf’s up.