Category Archives: EMC

EMC, Joe Tucci, M&A, News & Analysis, Rodney Rogers, SAP, Virtustream

EMC to acquire SAP specialist Virtustream in cloud push

EMC is buying SAP cloud specialist Virtustream

EMC is buying SAP cloud specialist Virtustream

EMC announced this week that it will acquire Virtustream, a firm specialising in deploying SAP software in the cloud, for $1.2bn.

The all-cash deal will see Virtustream, a specialist in SAP software automation and cloud on-boarding, form EMC’s managed cloud services business and operate alongside other EMC businesses in the Federation including VMware and Pivotal, which offer their own cloud services.

Up until now EMC only sold on-premise cloud storage systems largely tuned for supporting VMware customers, offering them a hybrid cloud capability, and the company said the acquisition will enable it to bolster its capabilities in both private and public cloud.

“Virtustream is an exceptional company and this is a critical and transformative acquisition for EMC in one of the industry’s fastest-growing and most important sectors,” said Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and chief executive officer.

“With Virtustream in place, EMC will be uniquely positioned as a single source for our customers’ entire hybrid cloud infrastructure and services needs. We could not be more delighted that Virtustream will be joining the EMC Federation family. It’s a game changer,” Tucci said.

EMC also said it plans to offer Virtustream’s xStream cloud management software, which is already integrated with VMware vSphere, to its partners.

“Virtustream has established itself as an industry leader and innovator for running mission-critical enterprise applications in the cloud,” said Rodney Rogers, Virtustream chairman and chief executive officer.

“We’re proud to be joining the EMC Federation where our combined capabilities, products and services will allow us to accelerate our vision of delivering the platform of record for enterprise systems, and address the complete breadth of cloud computing needs,” Rogers said.

Virtustream’s unique sales point is its cloud workload management and automation software, which will almost certainly see deeper integration with similar offerings across the federation (particularly VMware’s).

The acquisition is a pretty significant step for the storage specialist which more recently, with the exception of Virtustream, has seemed more interested in acquiring its way deeper into infrastructure than software; the move is part of its broader goal, announced last year, of becoming more cloud-centric.

EMC, Featured, Storage, Storage and Information Management, virtualized storage

EMC World 2013 Recap

By Randy Weis, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

 

The EMC World Conference held last week in Las Vegas demonstrated how EMC has a strong leadership position in the Virtualization, Storage and Software Defined Datacenter markets.

Seriously, this is not the Kool-Aid talking. Before anyone jumps in to point out how all the competitors are better at this or that, or how being a partner or customer of EMC has its challenges, I’d like to refer you to a previous blog I wrote about EMC: “EMC Leads the Storage Market for a Reason.” I won’t recap everything, but that blog talks about business success, not technical wizardry. Do the other major storage and virtualization vendors have solutions and products in these areas? Absolutely, and I promise to bring my opinions and facts around those topics to this blog soon.

What I found exciting about this conference was how EMC is presenting a more cohesive and integrated approach to the items listed below. The ExtremIO product has been greatly improved, some might say so that it is really usable now. I’d say the same about the EMC DR and BC solutions built on RecoverPoint and VPLEX – VPLEX is affordable and ready to be integrated into the VNX line. The VNX product line is mature now, and you can expect announcements around a major refresh this year. I’d say the same about the BRS line – no great product announcements, but better integration and pricing that helps customers and solution providers alike.

There are a few items I’d like to bullet for you:

  1. Storage Virtualization – EMC has finally figured out that DataCore is onto something, and spent considerable time promoting ViPR at EMC World. This technology (while 12 years to market behind DataCore) will open the eyes of the entire datacenter virtualization market to the possibilities of a Storage Hypervisor. What VMware did for computing, this technology will do for storage – storage resources deployed automatically, independent of the array manufacturer, with high value software features running on anything/anywhere. There are pluses and minuses to this new EMC product and approach, but this technology area will soon become a hot strategy for IT spending. Everyone needs to start understanding why EMC finally thinks this is a worthwhile investment and is making it a priority. To echo what I said in that prior blog, “Thank goodness for choices and competition!” Take a fresh look at DataCore and compare it to the new EMC offering. What’s better? What’s worse?
  2. Business Continuity and Highly Available Datacenters: Linking Datacenters to turn DR sites into an active computing resource is within reach of non-enterprise organizations now – midmarket, commercial, healthcare, SMB – however you want to define it.
    1. VPLEX links datacenters together (with some networking help) so that applications can run on any available compute or storage resource in any location – a significant advance in building private cloud computing. This is now licensed to work with VNX systems, is much cheaper and can be built into any quote. We will start looking for ways to build this into various solutions strategies – DR, BC, array migration, storage refreshes, stretch clusters, you name it.  VPLEX is also a very good solution for any datacenter in need of a major storage migration due to storage refresh or datacenter migration, as well as a tool to manage heterogeneous storage.
    2. RecoverPoint is going virtual – this is the leading replication tool for SRM, is integrated with VPLEX and now will be available as a virtual appliance. RP also has developed multi-site capabilities, with up to five sites, 8 RP “appliances” per site, in fan-in or fan-out configurations.
    3. Usability of both has improved, by standardizing management of both in Unisphere editions for both products.
    4. High Performance Storage and Computing – Server-side Flash, Flash Cache Virtualization and workload-crushing all-Flash arrays in the ExtremSF, ExtremSW and ExtremIO product line (formerly known as VFCache). As usual, the second release nails it for EMC. GreenPages was recently recognized as Global leaders in mission critical application virtualization, and this fits right in. Put simply, put an SSD card in a vSphere host and boost SQL/Oracle/EXCH performance over 100% in some cases. The big gap was in HA/DRS/vMotion. The host cache was a local resource, and thus vMotion was broken, along with HA and DRS. The new release virtualizes the cache so that VMs assigned local cache will see that cache even if it moves. This isn’t an all or nothing solution – you can designate the mission critical apps to use the cache and tie them to a subset of the cluster. This make this strategy affordable and granular.
    5. Isilon – This best in class NAS system keeps getting better. Clearly defined use cases, much better VMware integration and more successful implementations makes this product the one to beat in the scale-out NAS market.

 

Another whole article can be written about ViPR, EMC’s brand new storage virtualization tool, and that will be coming up soon. As promised, I’ll also take a look at the competitive offerings of HP and Dell, at least, in the Storage Virtualization, DR/BC, Server-side flash and scale-NAS solutions areas, as well as cloud storage integration strategies. Till then, thanks for reading this and please share your thoughts.

Data management, EMC, Storage, Storage and Information Management

EMC Leads the Storage Market for a Reason

By Randy Weis, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

There are reasons that EMC is a leader in the market. Is it because they come out first with the latest and greatest technological innovation? No, or at least not commonly. Is it because they rapidly turn over their old technology and do sweeping replacements of their product lines with the new stuff? No. It’s because there is significant investment in working through what will work commercially and what won’t and how to best integrate the stuff that passes that test into traditional storage technology and evolving product lines.

Storage Admins and Enterprise Datacenter Architects are notoriously conservative and resistant to change. It is purely economics that drives most of the change in datacenters, not the open source geeks (I mean that with respect), mad scientists and marketing wizards that are churning out & hyping revolutionary technology. The battle for market leadership and ever greater profits will always dominate the storage technology market. Why is anyone in business but to make money?

Our job as consulting technologists and architects is to match the technology with the business needs, not to deploy the cool stuff because we think it blows the doors off of the “old” stuff. I’d venture to say that most of the world’s data sits on regular spinning disk, and a very large chunk of that behind EMC disk. The shift to new technology will always be led by trailblazers and startups, people who can’t afford the traditional enterprise datacenter technology, people that accept the risk involved with new technology because the potential reward is great enough. Once the technology blender is done chewing up the weaker offerings, smart business oriented CIOs and IT directors will integrate the surviving innovations, leveraging proven manufacturers that have consistent support and financial history.

Those manufacturers that cling to the old ways of doing business (think enterprise software licensing models) are doomed to see ever-diminishing returns until they are blown apart into more nimble and creative fragments that can then begin to re-invent themselves into more relevant, yet reliable, technology vendors. EMC has avoided the problems that have plagued other vendors and continued to evolve and grow, although they will never make everyone happy (I don’t think they are trying to!). HP has had many ups and downs, and perhaps more downs, due to a lack of consistent leadership and vision. Are they on the right track with 3PAR? It is a heck of a lot more likely than it was before the acquisition, but they need to get a few miles behind them to prove that they will continue to innovate and support the technology while delivering business value, continued development and excellent post-sales support. Dell’s investments in Compellent, particularly, bode very well for the re-invention of the commodity manufacturer into a true enterprise solution provider and manufacturer. The Compellent technology, revolutionary and “risky” a few years ago, is proving to be a very solid technology that innovates while providing proven business value. Thank goodness for choices and competition! EMC is better because they take the success of their competitors at HP and Dell seriously.

If I were starting up a company now, using Kickstarter or other venture investment capital, I would choose the new products, the brand new storage or software that promises the same performance and reliability as the enterprise products at a much lower cost, knowing that I am exposed to these risks:

  • the company may not last long (poor management, acts of god, fickle investors) or
  • the support might frankly sucks, or
  • engineering development will diminish as the vendor investors wait for the acquisition to get the quick payoff.

Meanwhile, large commercial organizations are starting to adopt cloud, flash and virtualization technologies precisely for all the above reasons. Their leadership needs to drive profitability into the datacenter technologies to increase speed to market and improve profitability. As the bleeding edge becomes the smart bet as brought to market by the market leading vendors, we will continue to see success where Business Value and Innovation intersect.