Still More Cash

UPDATED – 13th May

Firstly, apologies for the length between updates; this will continue for a little while though as I'm doing house-related stuff and it is a busy time of year for birthdays and anniversaries in the 'Bod household. As it appears that the UK may get a summer this year, the update frequency may well end up reflecting this as well!!

So after saying lots of positive things about V-MAX and especially the announcement if not the delivery of FAST; a technology which will change storage management and administration; I would like to throw a big rock in the direction of Even More Cash. Symmetrix Management Console, a great administration tool for simplifying the administration of Symmetrix; reducing complexity of what is an historically overly byzantine environment to something more in line with the simplicity of the Clariion.

A tool which EMC should be proud of, a tool which proves that they can do something better than ECC, a tool which was free and rightly so; a tool which to manage their new V-MAX range is no longer FREE!

That's right like a crack dealer, your initial hit of SMC was free but if you want to continue to use it to manage their new arrays…it's going to cost you! So if you've foolishly based your processes and documentation around SMC, to continue with these, you are going to have to pay the man! Sorry guys but simply, that's a cheap-shot and in today's market; it's not acceptable.

Okay, I thought SMC was free because we get it for free; it is only free, if you are an ECC customer. Most large users do have the misfortune of being ECC customers and hence get SMC for 'free'. However, if you do not want to use the bloated monstrosity that is ECC; you will have to pay to get SMC. So EMC are still charging if you want an easy-to-use graphical configuration tool; you either buy ECC and get SMC thrown in or you can buy SMC.

NetApp have completely refreshed their GUI administration tool and enhanced it's functionality in NMC; a completely new tool, yet they realise that one of their main selling points is the simplicity of management and hence they continue to give the tool away. You can even download the tool for free and use it to manage the NetApp simulator, I hope someone from NetApp will pop-up and confirm that the NMC will continue to be free even once the mythical OnTap 8 ships.

So EMC, in the spirit of the continued push to simplify the management and administration of storage; re-think the idea of charging for SMC and leave it as a make it a free product. Publicise it, push it, demonstrate it and show how it can really simplify the administration of enterprise storage. You might even find it actually helps to sell a few more arrays. Otherwise, I have a horrid suspicion that storage management and administration will continue to be seen as a black-art.