Mega, Giga, Ultra, Uber launch!!!!

That’s right.   Today is the biggest storage event – ever.  

(if you’re reading this, and aren’t watching it on simulcast, something is wrong with you :-)

if you go to www.emc.com – you’ll see details, and get on…

We aren’t shy at this launch – and didn’t do it in a small way (watch the short video to get the highlights, and dive into the sub posts to get all the details – technical, videos, demos and more).   As the leader in shared storage, we wanted to dial this up to 12 :-)

We broke a series of storage records, and for fun – Breaking several Guinness world records linked to the themes of the products. 

Put one way – it really reinforces the fact that EMC is NOT the “if we don’t have what you want, then you don’t need it” company… And that we have a lot of fun :-)

For more behind the scenes, read on…

 

These product launches are a reflection of 5 very distinct themes I see occurring in the storage industry:

1. The incredible growth in SMB and smaller enterprises – who need simplicity, incredible capabilities, in small, low-cost packages, and who primarily purchase through channels.  This is what the VNXe is all about.
2. Meeting ever-changing “mainstream” storage needs – these are “swiss army knife platforms”.   We’re delivering our next generation unified storage platform which delivers 3x more performance, 3x more efficiency, and 3x simplicity.   This is what the VNX is all about.
3. The fact that the customers using the most powerful, most trusted platform VMAX now, via a software upgrade can make it even smarter (FAST VP, Federation, more performance and more).  This is what the VMAX updates are all about.
4. The growing need for “tactical nuke” storage – these are things to meet needs that can’t be met with swiss army knife architectures.  They demand scale-out solutions like nothing else out there.    That’s what Isilon and Atmos are all about.
5. The need for backup solutions that can protect it all – and deal with the very basic fact that when it comes to backup – speed REALLY matters.  There are only 24 hours in a day, but the volume of data isn’t slowing down.   That’s what the Data Domain updates are all about.

I’m going to cover each of these in detail, but I want to explore one idea before going into that detail.  Read on if you’re interested…

While EMC is MORE than a storage company (VMware is the leader in virtualization, RSA is the leader in security) EMC has far and away the most complete portfolio in the storage market, and this mega launch is a storage event.

Our portfolio fits together into a simple picture:

• We have solutions that serve traditional enterprise applications – in virtualized and non-virtualized contexts.  That’s the VNX family and the VMAX family.
• We have solutions that serve “Big Data” (if you’re starting in the “hundreds of TB, probably 1PB +” territory that’s what we’re talking about).  That’s the Isilon and Atmos family.
• We have solutions that compute and analyze big data to make it information enterprises can use to make decisions that can affect millions of dollars.   That’s the Greenplum family.
• We have solutions that back it all up – Data Domain and Avamar.

but often we’re asked “why not just do it all in one?”.   Well, put simply, you CAN’T.   No one does.  In fact, the entire organic and in-organic innovation (including M&A over the last few years) of the storage industry has our competitors working to try to pull together a picture like the one above.

Put it this way.   Imagine you’re going on a trip where you don’t know exactly what you’re going to need.   On a trip like that, you’d bring something like a really feature-rich, flexible swiss-army knife like this, right?

After all – you don’t know – you might need to cut some bread, tighten some screws, file some nails, open some beers.    That you CAN do “all in one”, and that’s what the VNX family does. The VNX family scales from:

• the smallest, most feature rich, simplest and least expensive platform – VNXe
• to the biggest bad-a$$ unified utility storage on the planet – VNX

These are incredible “swiss army knives”.   For persepctive, VNXe is 20% less expensive than the next closest competitor (while doing more!).  For another perspective the largest VNX config has 120 Intel Westmere cores and supports 1000 spindles, in any mix of SSD/EFD, SAS, SATA.

If that scale sounds “big”, consider that we now have more than 1,000 customers with more than 1PB of storage.

But - you might need even more – the largest VMAX config is even bigger – and supports up to 2400 spindles in practical use, with massive singular distributed, yet shared cache in the 1TB range.   Again, if that sounds whack, it’s not.  Our growth in that segment has been spectacular, and will continue to be fantastic.   We estimate that by 2020, there will be 100,000 customers with 1PB of storage or more.

But…   Let’s say you have a DIFFERENT problem than a “traditional enterprise storage challenge”… 

If you aren’t going on a jaunt where you might need to do anything in an “OK” way, but rather you’re on a specific mission you needed to accomplish – perhaps “cutting through a bunker”, well, a swiss-army knife would be a BAD choice.   In fact, all the core design choices that go into making a great swiss army knife would be a liability, and you would find yourself with a dull swiss-army knife against the wall of the bunker – and probably some cut hands.

We’re seeing this type of request more and more often.  If you’re in that category, your problem starts with massive datasets that are multi-PB scale.  That’s the biggest factor behind the rise of the red bar in the bar chart – customers who have 1 Exabyte or more.

• You might also need it to be transactional, with huge bandwidth performance envelopes, accessed by thousands or millions of people.   If this sounds strange, it’s all around you.   If you use iTunes, you understand the use case.   Imagine the running storage behind iTunes – you would have HUGE amounts of data, HUGE aggregate performance needs.   Think about what all the folks in the media business making digital movies like Avatar, or in the oil and gas industry, or people using genomics to cure disease.  That’s what Isilon is all about.
• You might need it to support native web 2.0 interfaces.   It’s not so much about being transactional, but more supporting 100 millions of objects.   If this sounds strange – it’s all around you.   If you use eBay, you understand the use case.    They have 90 Million Users globally.  They support 140 Million auctions all around the world.   They need Petabyte Scale Storage with embedded metadata, with inherent global federation and distribution.  That’s what Atmos is all about.

If you bring a swiss-army knife to these use cases – well, let’s just say you’ll hurt yourself, and hurt the customer.   You need something different – you need a tactical nuke.  

The reality is that the core architectural principles that go into Atmos and Isilon are very different than general purpose enterprise storage platforms.

There’s a need (in unit count) for a LOT more swiss army knives (general purpose enterprise storage) in the world, but bringing a 1000 of them to a challenge when what you really needed was a single tactical nuke – well… I think the outcome would be clear.

Likewise, when you need a swiss-army knife, a tactical nuke is – well, useless.

This may all sound strange – but EMC is in the business of helping ALL customers with their information.   After all, we are the storage leader (by a longshot) and our tagline is “where information lives”.  Just remember that this may all sound over the top, but we crazy humans have created 1,240,036,374,697,152,065,225 Bytes of content in 2010 – that’s 1.2 Zettabytes. 

With all that said – read on for detail (will link to posts as they go up over the day) on the new products, demos, world records, and more!!!

• VNXe - Simple, Efficient.   And AFFFORDABLE.
• VNX – Simple, Efficient, Affordable.  And POWERFUL.
• VMAX – Powerful, Trusted.   And now the SMARTEST.
• Data Domain – The World’s Fastest Backup.  And it ARCHIVES too.  (I’m going to phone this one in – it’s very late, and I’m tired :-)  Check out this and here)
• Greenplum – The World’s Most powerful, scalable, and cost effective Data Computing Appliance (and a killer sense of humor!)

Have fun today – there’s lots of interesting things we’re doing to celebrate and make the point – tune into the simulcast.

Would love your feedback – courteous comments always welcome!

Comments

[rpwallin]

41 new products? How many of the 41 are simply the same product(s) renamed, rebundled, or updated? Truth in Marketing please.