Actually, it matters a lot. The marketing claims are a key part of the overall fight for share in the multibillion-dollar high-end enterprise storage market. Vendors must persuade customers to commit to a platform that they'll be living with for the next two or three years, at least. And now that it's armed with the DMX, EMC is trying to shoot down the HDS Lightning 9900V as an architecture that's past its prime.
"This is just the beginning for us with this line," said Joe Tucci, EMC's president and CEO, in an interview earlier this month with Byte and Switch. "They [Hitachi] are now past their sweet spot." (See the full interview here).
Enterprise users agree that system performance is important, but they're wary of any vendor's performance claims.
"Bottom line: It's 'marketecture' in both cases," says Barry Brazil, enterprise SAN architect at Reliant Energy, a power company based in Houston. "Both arguments illustrate each company's proficiency in mathematical theory."
Having said that, however, Brazil who is evaluating both HDS Lightning and EMC's Symmetrix DMX systems agrees with EMC that bandwidth into cache is not nearly as important as the round-trip through cache, delivering the requested data back to the host from the spindle. "In the current world of in-order delivery, aggregate throughput far outweighs bandwidth in real-world situations," he says.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
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