I am seeing a lot of bizarre talk from EMC's competitors about V-MAX. The gist of it is that V-MAX is too big and too expensive for the market. The market just wants mid-range etc, etc. Why the hell do EMC's competitors care; if EMC have got it horribly wrong, no-one will buy V-MAX and it'll be the death of EMC! They'll go the way of Sun, SGI, DEC etc and become a memory!
But we know this is simply not true; there is still a market for high-end; large enterprises are still generating bits at a crazy rate! There are various ways of solving the problem; monolith, clusters,modular, m-monolith; external virtualisation but it is simply the case that data grows.
Not everyone needs a bus, some people need a people-carrier, some people an estate car, some people a sports car. No one size fits all. Mainframes still sell. If you decide that you want to leave the rarified slopes of high-end Enterprise storage to EMC; that's cool.
Now, you might want to attack EMC about the sheer number of storage products that they have and the sheer number of interfaces you need to learn (V-MAX/DMX, CX, Celerra, Centera, Atmos, Iomega, Hokey-Cokey 3000 etc) but to attack them because V-MAX is too big; that's just odd!
*m-monolith is a modular monolith like Stone Henge…I am waiting for the first V-MAX installation to be arranged in a Henge-like layout!
Thanks for the perspective, Martin.
I’d also like to “remind” people that the smallest V-Max is only 48 drives. And that the beauty of scale-out modular storage is that it CAN grow to be huge, but it doesn’t HAVE to.
More importantly, with a modular scale-out architecture, customers don’t pay for what the array CAN do until they actually want to do it.
Re Stone Henge :- suspect this might need to more like the mighty Tap’s version of Henge, as geo-dispersal of cabinets ‘might not’ be that big?
To Barry’s point :- agree re entry V-Max, hence the Qs re why CX?? But also that the software & licensing features and functions need to be very much changed to work with a real required/used metric rather than current models… Simplification of license model & automation of license usage & reporting is vital in a modular scale-out area. Oh and of course the ever present spectre of SRM need to be sorted (pension for Mr ECC?)
My additional points :- the current view of ‘the tin’ in vmax is only 20% of the value story. It’s the fundamental change in approach re components and software that really makes the potential for future value. FAST & abstracting the h/ware layer properly are key. Of course there are some interesting implications re other parts that will only get revealed over time…
Yes I believe v-max really has the potential to be a new generation in it’s class, but to really do that the other EMC products need a proper culling…
I think that the Platform that EMC has developed in V-MAX, and the more I think about it, it becomes more of a platform play than simply a storage array; should allow them to simplify their product story if they so wish.
Platform plays are scarey things for vendors to make and especially previous ‘niche’ players, so expect V-MAX to evolve to platform status.