I’m about 10 seconds into the part of the conversation I can blog about when Pat Gelsinger’s Assistant appears. I ask if she needs to speak with him, she tells me it can wait and she leaves.
Pat leans towards me conspiratorially with a hand slightly covering his mouth. “You scared her off.”
“I have that effect on people” I reply. Not believing a word of it in this case.
A smart person would realise that a clock has just started ticking down to the next appointment on Pat’s ever changing but always tightly kept schedule. A smarter person would realise that the way to ensure you get more time later is to not make the Assistant’s working day any more complex by over running your appointment into another appointment.
Time for me to get moving then.
Eight months ago Pat, Intel’s first CTO, the lead on the 80486 microprocessor and head of their largest revenue generating division joined EMC as Chief Operating Officer and President of Information Infrastructure Products. I knew I’d like working for him because he’s obsessed with products (Like me), is available at crazy hours to answer questions (Like me) and sets aggressive deadlines with product teams. (Also like me the difference being I can’t make them deliver anything. He can and already has.)
Flipping the face of my wrist watch around for it to be not as noticeable when I glance at it to ensure I don’t over run I start asking questions.
When you first reviewed the product set right after you joined what was important to you?
“Within the first two minutes of seeing VPLEX I was nearly up and out of the chair as I knew it was that important. This ability to cache large datasets over distance changed the way I thought about storage and how it could be used for data centre failover, workload mobility and disaster recovery. And if it changed how I thought about these things I knew it would change how IT Architects and System Administrators thought about them.”
What can customers expect from EMC over the next 12 months?
“Well certainly we’re going to do more transformative things like we’ve seen with VPLEX. VPLEX is a starting point.
Secondly we’re going to become the best in terms of integrating our infrastructure into virtualized environments. Both with VMware and Microsoft with Hyper-V.”
How important is Microsoft Hyper-V to EMC?
“Very important. As you go to the mid-market Microsoft are incredibly strong as an IT provider. We’ll be doing a lot more with them across the spectrum in general and a lot more with Hyper-V in specific.
Going back to what to expect I think you’ve heard me speak about the evil twins of Security & Management in a Virtual Infrastructure World before. In many regards people think about the Data Path and the Control Path and then think they’re done. As we go even deeper into virtualization we find that many of the complexities of infrastructure and storage are tied up in manageability. When you move to address those complexities the evil twin of security becomes a problem and becomes a problem of magnitude when you start moving workloads inside and outside of your data centre. So you need to address the Data Path which is the underlying infrastructure, the Control Path which is manageability of that infrastructure and attest to the Security of both simultaneously.”
Hardware Root Of Trust?
“That’s a part of it. We discussed that at the RSA Conference.”
What are your thoughts on Unified Storage?
“Simplicity and Efficiency are the two focus areas for Unified Storage and are the two focus areas for everything else.
Lets talk about Atmos for a moment before we delve into Unified. Atmos with it’s SOAP and REST interfaces running in a Virtual Machine is simple enough for those running web applications. It’s even in one of the names, right? Simple Object Access Protocol. It’s policy driven object storage with erasure codes for protection so that’s very efficient. It has massive scale but you can run it on a vSphere system if you choose. Maybe that’s a Vblock, maybe it’s a stand alone system.
If it is a Vblock simplicity carries on through to Unified Infrastructure Manager for Vblock. You have vSphere, Cisco UCS, switches and storage. UIM pulls all those together very simply.
With the mid-market Unified Storage offerings I expect we’ll see people drive up their overall system utilisation using Compression, the second generation of FAST and FAST Cache. Those systems are already efficient today these new features just set them further apart. Look at all of those efficiency features. A checkbox or radio button in Unisphere and they’re configured and running.
The provisioning model itself is also going to get even simpler and more efficient over the next 12 months.
What do you consider to be interesting in the industry at large today?
“Well if you go back six or seven years ago the IT industry was pretty boring. You had Infrastructure providers, Application providers and Mainframe providers holding onto their particular floor tiles in your data centre. Pretty boring, right?
The industry was pretty stable and each generation of product was better than the last but there were no radical changes. Radical change was bad. Guess what? Everything is changing now. Radically. Huge adoption of the Virtual Data Centre, the move to Cloud environments and the Verticalization Vs Virtualization of IT as it becomes IT as a Service.
The product changes are driven by technological breakthroughs like x86 multicore, virtualization and flash technology. The industry structure is changing and the very nature of the business model of IT is changing.
This is a very exciting time.”
Final questions. Are you a gadget guy? Do you get questions from your wife asking what’s that and why did you feel the need to buy it?
“I get those questions all the time. I travel a lot so like most gadget geeks I’m carrying multiple items in my carry on bag. I always have my iPhone…”
I’m an Android user.
“My son has just bought an Android phone so he can expect it to vanish for a bit as I’ll need try it out. I have my Lenovo laptop, I pretty much live on that and I’m never too far away from my Kindle. I’m a Kindle guy. I’ve played with an iPad but I’m definitely a Gen 2 or Gen 3 iPad adopter.”
