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October, 2015:

Dude – You’re Getting An EMC

Oct 12th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
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Just a few thoughts on the Dell/EMC takeover/merger or whatever you want to call it. 

  1. In a world where IT companies have been busy splitting themselves up; think HP, Symantec, IBM divesting from server business…it seems a brave move to build a new IT behemoth. 
  2. However; some of the restructuring already announced hints at a potential split in how Dell do business. Dell Enterprise to be run out of Hopkinton and using EMC’s Enterprise smarts in this space.
  3. Dell have struggled to build a genuine storage brand since going their different ways; arguably their acquisitions have under-performed.
  4. VMware is already under attack from various technologies – VMware under control of hardware server vendor would have been a problem a decade ago but might be less so as people have more choices for both virtualising Heritage applications and Cloud-Scale. VMware absolutely now have to get their container strategy right.
  5. EMC can really get to grips with how to build their hyper-converged appliances and get access to Dell’s supply chain. 
  6. That EMC have been picked up by a hardware vendor just shows how hard it is to transition from a hardware company to a software company. 
  7. A spell in purdah seems necessary for any IT company trying to transition their business model. Meeting the demands of the market seems to really hamper innovation and change. EMC were so driven by a reporting cycle, it drove very poor behaviours.
  8. All those EMC guys who transitioned away from using Dell laptops to various MacBooks…oh dear!
  9. I doubt this is yet a done deal and expect more twists and turns! But good luck to all my friends working at both companies! May it be better!

 

Overcoming Objections

Oct 6th, 2015
by Martin Glassborow.
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My friend Enrico is a massive fan of Object Storage whereas for a long time, I’ve had the reputation of being somewhat sceptical; feeling the whole thing has been somewhat overhyped. The hype started with EMC’s Atmos launch and continued from there. 

The problem with Object Storage has been the lack of support from application vendors especially in the space that I work in. And development teams, especially those working in organisations with large numbers of heritage applications have been very slow to embrace it.  Most just want to work with standard filesystems.

And so we saw the birth of the cloud-gateway; devices that sat in front of the object-stores and presented the object-stores in a more familiar manner. Yet often the way that these were licensed simply added cost and negated the low cost of object store; they also added complexity into an environment.

The Object Storage vendors were slower to acknowledge the issue and really wanted you to use the API to access the storage; some of the larger vendors really didn’t want their Object Storage to cannibalise their NAS revenues and were even slower to acknowledge the issue.

So it seemed that Object Storage was really going to be confined to the world of cloud-scale and cloud-native applications. 

But this now seems to be rapidly changing; robust NFS implementations from the Object Storage vendors are becoming significantly more common; SMB implementations still seem to be rather patchy but once they become more robust, I see Object Storage becoming the standard for file-serving applications. 

Will we see API-driven ‘file access’ become the universal method for interacting with file storage? Not for some time but having the choice and realising that it is a not and all or nothing scenario will begin to ease friction in this space.