Archive for the ‘Partners’ Category

The Sixth Differentiating Feature: Bandwidth Reduction

For almost 8 years, Sebastian Darrington, who maintains a much-read blog under the title The Storage Chap, has been discussing and debating various approaches to disaster recovery and business continuity planning. In June, he posted an article on The Six Differentiating Features of RecoverPoint. Add to that the excellent post he wrote in January on Zero Data Loss with Asynchronous Replication, and you’ll get a pretty complete picture of the EMC/Axxana benefits.

The sixth differentiating feature he mentions in his June blog post is Bandwidth Reduction. It is specifically this feature that makes RecoverPoint and Axxana the perfect combination for organizations that operate in regions that have less-reliable or very expensive communication costs. Of course, regardless of where an organization operates, there’s no sense in throwing away good money on bandwidth. But in some regions of the world, you can’t get good bandwidth, regardless of the price.

EMC World was a great event! Axxana’s Select Theatre presentation was delivered by our own Brendan Foye, Director of Sales, USA West. According to the EMC Select team on the floor, it was by far the most attended session at the Select Theatre. Some of them asked me “What did you do to get such a crowd?”

Axxana at EMC World Select Theatre

It’s no surprise to anyone who has heard Brendan present, but, the presentation went very well. And the buzz continued long after his presentation. People came to our booth saying they saw his presentation and wanted to hear more. At the V bar later that night, people were still talking to me about how cool the Axxana Phoenix is and how great the presentation went. They started asking me if we smashed and crashed the box and I right there on the spot went to YouTube with my iPhone and showed them the mechanical tests video that we have on our channel WEDR, complete with the fire, earthquake, explosion, penetration and water tests. It was, as Chad Sakac would say “AWESOME”!!!

Stage is one thing… but EMC TV??? My friend Lara El-Ghazal from Philly was the beautiful host this year and in between conversations about potential customers who will surely benefit from Axxana’s transformation of Async to Sync… we also… by chance… really… talked about sending a TV live crew to our booth… and sure enough, they came. Mr. Paul Jassies, Axxana’s Director of Sales, EMEA, did a remarkable job in his first TV appearance. Word on the floor was that he was the one who sent RPO-0 to do dance with the TV crew live. That was so much fun! RPO-0 was everywhere at the show. Our friends from Presidio, an EMC Channel Partner, took a picture of RPO-0 strapped to the rope of their climbing wall… again… AWESOME!!!

RPO-0 Ready to Climb The Wall

As for the trade show… it was great. We had many meetings which were pre-set with end users and that’s a lot of what it is about. We had many EMC’ers bring their customers to our booth and of course, random end users who visited us and went home with a phone call in their future. We now have many good friends at EMC, people from all ranks and all roles… and many of them came to our booth to say hello. Having all of us and all of them in the same place at the same time – that’s… you guessed it – AWESOME!

Especially noteworthy was Jerry Eudey who walked around wearing our special, limited edition, “Team Axxana” shirt, which no Axxana employee is allowed to wear, by the way. And if we are talking about friendship… Axxana and RecoverPoint were seen going strong and steady at the show this year, with RecoverPoint’s new booth and back and forth referencing of Zero Data Loss @ Distance (RP+Axxana) to create the world’s strongest, most cost effective, replication solution, with not even a hint of competition. VNX/CLARiiON today… VMAX and VPLEX – here we come!!! Now… isn’t that… AWESOME?!

Maroon 5 Shaking It Up at EMC World

Even at EMC World 2012, it’s not all business. Last night everyone had a great time shaking it up with Maroon 5. Of course, the organizers knew everyone would be exhausted from three packed days of education, information, and entertainment, so they are kicking off today with a keynote from Steve Duplessie, Founder of Enterprise Strategy Group, at 8:30 this morning. If you are in the storage industry, you  know Steve Duplessie, and you know, that even if you are exhausted, he will WAKE YOU UP.

Steve will be talking about flash and how flash is shaking up the storage industry. He’ll cut through the hype and, as his blog says, give us “The Bigger Truth.” I’m sure it will be streaming live on EMC TV, so you can watch it at home, or if you are at EMC World, but can’t get out  of bed this morning, you can watch from your hotel room.

Our RPO-0 solution, the Phoenix System RP, uses flash. Watch this short video clip and you’ll see us doing a whole lot of shaking. Don’t try this with your spinning disk.

RPO-0 Meets VNX and Promises Total Protection

Coming from Tel Aviv, I’m used to the heat, but Las Vegas was over 100 degrees yesterday at EMC World 2012.  I figured it wouldn’t matter, because I stayed inside, with our new mascot, RPO-0. Turns out, though, it was just as hot inside. RPO-0 got a lot of attention, and hundreds came over meet him. Of course, one of his favorite visitors was RPO-0′s BFF, VNX.

Don’t forget to stop Booth #728 to meet RPO-0 in person, and remember that Eli Efrat, our CEO, will be speaking today at the Select Theatre at 1:30PM. Ask him how to get your own RPO-0.

Finally, if, tragically, you weren’t able to attend EMC World, you can still watch interviews and keynote presentations streaming live from theCube and EMC TV. We’ve been on EMC TV twice this week. Hey, it’s hot under the camera lights, but nobody handles heat better than Axxana’s RPO-0.  We prove it with this video showing RPO-0 being tested to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.

See RPO-0 in Action at EMC World 2012

EMC World 2012 is next week in Las Vegas. The Axxana team will be there in force, including our CEO, Eli Efrat, and CTO, Dr. Alex Winokur. It’s a huge event with plenty of options as to how to spend your time, so careful planning helps you make the most of the days.

As a company that has done deep technology integration with EMC’s RecoverPoint, you will find us at many of the RecoverPoint sessions.  There are now twelve.  To find the sessions, just go to the EMC World Scheduler and search on RecoverPoint.

If you are a VNX or VNXe customer, I recommend you attend the session by Jonathan Meltzer, entitled “VNX and VNXe Data Protection: Recovering from Disasters – Large and Small.” He’ll be presenting on both Monday and Tuesday.

If you are responsible for disaster recovery or IT budgeting, you should try to connect with Lynn Osborn, Director of Engineering Services at The Pinnacle Group.  He’s the individual that helped Animal Health International achieve a zero-data-loss IT environment on a budget that any mid-sized company can afford. You can hear Lynn discuss his experience with Axxana in this short video on our YouTube channel. Stop by Booth 728, and we’ll help connect you with Lynn.

As an EMC Select Partner, we are very pleased to have a cameo presentation at the Select Theatre on Wednesday the 23rd, at 1:30pm. Don’t miss it. At the presentation you will learn how to transform asynchronous replication to synchronous replication.

Finally, if you can’t attend EMC World, consider watching the live streaming video that will be coming from theCube. As always, the folks at SiliconAngle and Wikibon will be providing great coverage and interviews with EMC executives, EMC customers, and EMC partners.

We hope to see you in Vegas!

Gartner Reports EMC Number 1 in External Controller Based Disk Storage

EMC topped the market in 2011 for External Controller-Based Disk Storage, according to a report released by Gartner Group in March. In fact, Gartner Group reports that EMC’s share of the market grew to almost thirty-three percent (33%). Congratulations, EMC, on a tremendous accomplishment.

One of the ways in which a company achieves market leadership is through setting and maintaining high standards in both their products and their partnerships. We, at Axxana, are proud to have partnered with EMC from our earliest days, integrating with EMC’s RecoverPoint software, passing rigorous testing in EMC’s E-Lab, and achieving EMC Select designation. Together, EMC and Axxana are delivering some of the highest quality, most innovative business continuity and disaster recovery solutions available today, and our joint customers are enjoying the benefits.

There's Plenty of Business in Japan and Asia

Sumitomo Corporation has a venture arm, Presidio Ventures.  Sumitomo helps Presidio’s portfolio companies expand their business in the Japan and Asia regions. And there’s plenty of business in Japan and Asia.

For anyone who has followed the string of natural disasters that have affected the Japan and Asia regions, it should be no surprise that Sumitomo is interested in any technology that can help organizations survive and recover from a disaster. But Sumitomo didn’t invest in just any technology. They invested in ours.

There are plenty of solutions that help corporations restore their applications and data after a disaster. There are existing solutions for tape backup and disk-based backup. There are disk snapshot and remote asynchronous replication solutions. All of these help restore operations, but they also all leave data exposed and many lead to long recovery times.

One of the reasons we are so attractive in the Japan and Asia markets is that we reduce costs and enable extended distances, while protecting all of the data and enabling rapid recovery.  Much of the savings that we deliver come from reduced data communications charges, which are particularly high in the Asia region.

We are thrilled to have Sumitomo on board as investors, and know that with the help of Sumitomo, we can ensure that businesses operating in the Japan and Asia regions, protect their data and their business.

If you are a regular reader of Chuck’s Blog, you probably read his comments on the VMAXe announcement. For those of you who don’t know, VMAXe is a smaller version of EMC’s high-end VMAX array, but with a couple of important differences. VMAXe doesn’t support IBM zSeries or iSeries servers and, as Chuck writes, “Astute readers will note the initial lack of SRDF support on the VMAXe.”

I would assume that EMC will ultimately offer SRDF for the VMAXe, but the initial choice to launch only with RecoverPoint for replication makes sense to us. There’s a huge installed base of CLARiiON and now VNX customers and a growing installed base of RecoverPoint customers. As customers continue to consolidate their storage, VMAXe is a logical platform.  As more storage gets consolidated, concerns regarding availability and recoverability increase, which will drive additional demand for RecoverPoint.

Customers like to standardize, because it makes their operational life easier, and standardizing on data protection makes sense, because the last place you want to have added complexity is when things are going terribly wrong. RecoverPoint allows customers to standardize data protection approaches across VMAXe and VNX product lines. One of the reasons that we chose to partner with EMC generally, and RecoverPoint specifically, was their commitment to provide a standardized approach to data protection across platforms.

Axxana: 100% Relaxed at EMC World 2011

First, a big thank you to everyone who stopped by to see us at EMC World.   Our theme was 100% Relaxed. And while we were very relaxed setting up the booth, we had huge crowds throughout the week, as everyone wanted to visit our Data Lifeguards.

Axxana Data Lifeguards in Action

I hope that they helped you relax just a little.  If we did nothing else, we proved two things:

1. Our lives are filled with series of unexpected events
2. If you prepare properly, you will still be able to relax

Our CEO, Eli Efrat, appeared on The Cube, looking very relaxed, and talked evolution and revolution, the progress that Axxana has made over the past year, Axxana’s ability to augment RecoverPoint, enabling synchronous replication over any distance, reducing peak-load communication costs, and eliminating the need for additional data centers. We help you turn a very small investment into a tremendous financial impact. You can watch a replay of his interview with Dave Vellante of Wikibon here, including a surprise visit by The Stig.

One way that EMC’s customers are trying to relax more is by moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud.  In keeping with that, we have stayed in lockstep with our partner, EMC, by supporting VCE Vblock together with EMC RecoverPoint.  In case you don’t know, VCE Vblocks are the integrated building blocks from VMware, Cisco and EMC, to enable rapid deployments of private clouds. Rick Walsworth, the Director of Product Marketing for EMC’s Infrastructure Management Group and a huge champion for EMC’s RecoverPoint software, appeared on The Cube and talked about the importance of protecting data, when applications are moved into the cloud.  His interview with Dave Vellante  and John Furrier of Silicon Angle is here.

We had hundreds of meetings at EMC World, but we aren’t done getting the message out.  More details to come, but we will be bringing our theme of relaxation to a series of lunch and learn events around the U.S.  I hope to see you at one of our upcoming events.

This week, as thousands of IT professionals converge at EMC World, many will be getting their first look at Axxana’s Phoenix System RP. The system, which integrates with EMC RecoverPoint and all RecoverPoint-supported platforms, forces IT professionals to change the way they think and to imagine what was previously thought impossible. Now it truly is possible for companies to protect all of their data over any distance through a wide range of disasters.  It is not only possible, but it is affordable for virtually any mid-sized and large enterprise customer. And thanks to RecoverPoint’s and the Phoenix System RP’s integration with VCE Vblocks, zero data loss over any distance is also possible for smaller companies that are leveraging public cloud infrastructures based upon VCE Vblocks.

If you look at the home page of our Axxana website, you will see that we have changed our banner this week to honor other great innovators. These individuals imagined and created what was previously thought impossible. The Wright brothers proved that flight was not just for birds, bees, and bats, but that man, too could fly. Alexander Graham Bell proved that people could remain connected and communicate, hearing each others’ voices over vast distances.  John Bardeen and his colleagues, who developed commercially available transistors proved that electronics could be made affordable for the masses, and Albert Einstein, well, he changed just about everything we thought about the physical world.

In his book, The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb explains how Europeans could not imagine black swans until they actually saw them.  Just like black swans, many will not believe that they can recover their data from the ashes, until they see the Phoenix System RP.  No one today  denies the existence of black swans, and everyone can imagine them. Soon, no one will doubt the ability to protect all data and recover it from the ashes, from the floods, from an earthquake, or from a building collapse.  If you are at EMC World, please stop by and see for yourself.  We are at Booth 605.