You’ve had the view from the mountain top from Chuck and the view from Chad’s Basement from Chad so it’s probably about time we went straight to the bottom line.
On Monday Isilon had around 500 employees and operated in 4 countries. Today EMC Isilon has access to 12000 sales people operating in 83 countries.
Their new sales force is 24 times the size of their division, 48 times the size of their previous sales force if we assume a 50:50 headcount split between sales and engineering/corporate, with their market reach now significantly larger. And that’s before you include the channel.
Chad mentioned the swim lanes of Big Data and Transactional Storage, nice and clear cut on the page but they’ll expand and overlap in the room going forward.
OneFS was the storage system which in the same period of time was standing behind everything from The A-Team’s flying tank to mapping the genome of the African Elephant back a couple of million years but here’s what I’ll tell every EMC sales person or Storage Admin who asks me where I think they should position Isilon, I’ll say if you’ve built a significant amount of your infrastructure on NAS and have a multiple NAS arrays supporting that infrastructure then there’s a solid case to introduce Isilon.
The logic here is why bother patching and managing multiple Network Attached Storage systems when you can patch and manage one Network Attached Storage system which scales to capacities exceeding the aggregate capacity of all those other systems you may already have on the floor?
This was the dream that launched a thousand roadmap slide decks right? Giant storage container to which you can add extra capacity to just by powering that capacity up, define that capacity into logical tiers, roll the hardware over on refresh and have the Admins spend their time on higher level activities instead of cutting out and juggling file systems.
Because of it’s Big Data design Isilon is not going to be the solution for every thing, but once EMC starts putting it in front of NAS users I expect it’ll be found to be the simplest solution for many things.
