Posts Tagged ‘SRDF’

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.

You may have heard, there was a magnitude 5.3 earthquake in Serbia this week.  Earthquakes are relatively common in Serbia. They’ve had more than fifteen >4.0 magnitude earthquakes in the past 10 years, but this was the strongest.

Serbia is  developing into a banking and trading hub, and so having trading systems that are up and available is important. It’s also important that the banks and trading companies not lose data, and earthquakes are not their friend. These companies don’t operate on the same scale as London, New York, or Tokyo.  While they can’t afford the latest EMC VMAX and multi-hop replication, they still need to protect as much data as possible, in the event of a disaster.  Even if the companies could afford VMAX, high-bandwidth communication links needed to support metropolitan-area synchronous replication and wide-area asynchronous replication are very expensive.   RecoverPoint from EMC is very popular in the country, because it enables companies to move periodic, application-consistent updates to a disaster recovery site or secondary data center.  But, there’s a tradeoff that companies in Serbia are making, even with RecoverPoint. Read the rest of this entry »

I just had a call with John McArthur, who helped us out at an EMC Select Road Show last week.  John is President of Walden Technology Partners, Inc., and was the top storage analyst at IDC for many years.  He now works as an advisor to several technology companies, including Axxana.

John told me there were about 140 Commercial Account sales reps at the road show, and that they are “very PUMPED” about  Axxana.   EMC is, for sure, a storage company, but more than that, they’re a systems company. Like any good systems company, they want to sell solutions, and hopefully solutions to problems that are more challenging than “I need more storage, and I need it to be cheaper.”  So when John told them that they had an opportunity to solve problems for customers that no other systems company today could solve, they really listened, and they got excited.

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