There's no eating canine pet food at EMC, you drink your own Champagne.
Lets talk about email archiving. I always find it stunning to be in an archiving opportunity against a competitor who isn't actually archiving email at their own company.
You'd be shocked at the number of faux expert vendors out there who'll talk to you about why their solution is the right one for you only to leave the meeting room go back to the office and then start deleting email because they've hit the size limit on their inbox.
No credibility and a case of EPIC FAIL if there ever was one.
EMC on the other hand archives and protects email on Exchange servers for more than 35K employees using EMC software and storage platforms. Ask the other folks what they're doing in their house.
The last batch of email I deleted was to speed Outlook up, not because I bumped my head off of any mailbox quota, and some of that email went as far back as to when Clinton was in power.
As a remote worker email is my main channel of communication back into the company and the team I'm in, when there's an outage I'm cut off from a key part of the company's digital nervous system. Fortunately for me EMC IT have the whole thing humming like it's dial tone. I pick up my Crackberry, use Outlook Web Access or VPN in and the service is available.
On the topic of Exchange, I found it a bit weird that the Exchange DAS Vs Storage Array conversation has taken on a DAS Vs SAN slant. The point here has been missed by a mile.
Microsoft's Exchange team find themselves at the sharp end of Google's GMail/Postini pricing so how are they reducing the cost of Exchange? By trying to take the cost out of everything Exchange sits on.
Users are asking IT departments why they can't have GMail's bottomless pit of storage space with their company email account (Which you can have if you're archiving email) and the MS answer is to drive down storage costs by building in features typically found in a storage array, such as replication, to ensure if there's any money being spent it's going to be spent on paying for Exchange licenses and maintenance.
This is about attacking the idea of networked storage, not just SAN, not just IP SAN and not just NAS in the hope that they can continue to get what they see as their rightful share of the IT budget. It's the same strategy Oracle have been using for a while now with RAC, ASM, RMAN and everything else which comes included with their licensing and support.
Is there any differentiation in email and calendaring? I'll leave that to Microsoft to answer but there are more than a few customers out there who won't mind if their email is delivered to them in Outlook or not.
It's a price sensitive game.
Price sensitivity just turns on another light. Should FLASH be used as expensive disk or cheap RAM?
A lot of that going around and right now I'm a supporter of using FLASH as disk. Not because I'm a wizard of storage system design but because I recognize it's as a tried and tested idea and we have a lot of experience to draw from. Such as knowledge of failure scenarios for example.
A FLASH drive fails in a RAID set. Well we know how to handle the failure and depending on RAID type we know the set may run in a degraded mode until a rebuild completes. Perhaps we've already proactively spared the drive and there's no performance impact.
Is EMC drinking it's own Champagne when it comes to FLASH Drives? Yes. They're in production, saving money and reducing spindle count for high performance databases.
VMware deployments, where's the Champagne?
EMC.com and probably every other site you touch at EMC runs on ESX, as does Exchange, EMC|ONE, EMC Labs, Customer Support sites, Engineering systems, all the hosted apps I use every day and a lot of other kit and caboodle around the place.
With the last number I saw EMC uses more than 3000 ESX systems in it's day to day operations. Not the largest ESX deployment I'd imagine but we run as much as possible on ESX, when coupled with EMC storage platforms, information management and backup software that's most certainly a case of drinking your own Champagne.
2009 is going to be an interesting year for EMC and VMware. VMworld thundered the arrival of Sakac and his troops, like Patton storming Europe he has a lot lined up this year.
So, there you go. When in doubt ask if your vendor is drinking their own Champagne.
And if they're not, why should you?
