EMC's Storage Strategy

Posted by David Hill
December 27, 2012

The second monkey wrench thrown into the traditional storage planning model is the need for flash or solid state drives (SSDs). Why? Simply put, CPU performance has historically increased by two orders of magnitude (100x) each decade. But while hard disk drives have increased in capacity over that same period, they did not increase in read/write speed. That has resulted in severe I/O bottleneck problems. Enter flash storage, which is one means of supporting applications that demand high performance. Enter also a gold rush of smaller players, as well as large IT vendors, into this market space. EMC's Flash Products Division addresses the flash market.

Among the biggest questions about flash is where it is best deployed. The answer is--it depends. One of EMC's solutions mixes flash along with traditional hard disks into a hybrid array, where flash provides another "0" storage tier. All of EMC's big storage lines--VMAX, VNX and Isilon--support hybrid arrays. For other applications, EMC will offer an all-flash SSD array (EMC has codenamed this Project X, but has not publicly revealed product details), as well as a PCIe flash (VFCache) capability at the server level.

Again, EMC isn't alone in this market. Everybody has a flash story, from the big vendors to a a cast of thousands (it seems!) of smaller vendors, including Fusion-IO, Violin Memory, SolidFire, Astute Networks and Whiptail.

Mesabi Musings

Trying to cover the entire strategy of any large IT vendor is like the old story about the blind men trying to describe an elephant--you can get your hands around individual parts, but it's difficult to step back and understand the whole.

In addition, the analysis of business strategy has evolved a lot in recent years (notably Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the chasm" and Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's dilemma" themes among them). While EMC recognizes the different schools of thought and uses them as appropriate, it has a refreshing and positive approach very much its own that was clearly on display at the EMC Industry Analyst Summit. It might be called "all strategy is action."

For EMC, strategy is an ongoing, continuous and iterative process that permeates all company actions (including product development and sales initiatives) over all time frames--operational (immediate, short-term), tactical (say, weeks to months) and long-term strategic (say, a year or more)--under the influence of core guiding principles (such as ongoing investment in R&D). A few other vendors are attempting a similar approach, but we may not have to wait another 10 years to see whether EMC's strategy will succeed.

EMC is a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.

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