EMCs overhaul of its Clariion offerings today may well have set the tone for the midrange market over the next few years.
By adding solid state disks, virtual provisioning, spin-down disk technology, and a host of other features to its CX4, EMC has issued a clear challenge to rivals such as HP and IBM.
[The] new Clariion CX4 series should rejuvenate EMCs midrange systems sales in Q3 and Q4, wrote Kaushik Roy, senior analyst at Pacific Growth Equities, in a research note released this morning. Note [that] EMC is going to be the first to market with Flash drives in the midrange storage -- EMCs new CX4 will heighten the competition with IBM, HP, and NetApp.
EMCs midrange growth had decelerated to about 8 percent in the vendors Q2 results, compared to the high-end DMX, which grew 10 percent year-over-year, he explained.
Like many people, Roy expects that there will be very limited adoption of Flash technology this year, with less than 1 percent of CX4s sold with Flash, but he feels that EMC has nonetheless made a very shrewd move.