Pat Gelsinger is just off of stage and EMC is now a supplier and developer of Hadoop and PCI Express Flash Storage.
Lets get into it.
Lets follow up from Mega Launch, how was the Boston Marathon?
It was great until mile 19, then my right calf cramped up making the rest slow and arduous.
But you finished?
Yes I did. With a time of 4:31 and that’s all that matters!
EMC is now a contributor to and supplier of Hadoop. There are a lot of Hadoop vendors there. Where do you see EMC adding value and differentiating from the six or seven suppliers already in that space?
Well lets step back and see what’s in the portfolio. Greenplum is great for scale out structured analytics. Hadoop is clearly the lead environment for unstructured or semi structured analytics. so we’re going to embrace that into the Greenplum family.
We will compete head to head with other distributions, like those from Cloudera and IBM, while staying fully committed to the Apache open source model and working towards driving standards.
We will differentiate this under, beside and above. Under, with VMware integration and Hadoop Appliances. Beside, with Greenplum integration. Above management with VMware for self service and Greenplum Chorus for collaboration.
What do customers think about that?
It’s early but the reactions have been positive.
On Open Source. Historically EMC has not been a significant contributor to Open Source projects, VMware on the other hand through it’s integration of SpringSource is now a significant contributor to open source projects. Is EMC Hadoop the start of greater open source involvement on EMC’s part?
Yes. You’ll see us becoming increasingly active in specific Open Source projects like this and in other targeted areas.
Project Lightning. EMC is using server side Flash on a PCI Express Card to extend array cache directly to the server.
That’s correct. I heard from many customers that the ability to have server side Flash interact with their Arrays for persistent storage, high availability and shared storage data services is highly desired. Thus we’re giving the best of both worlds to our customers and bringing our world class sales and support positions to bear to create a unique position in that market.
On that market, there are already companies in server side Flash storage but they’re Direct Attached Storage focused. Is EMC wedded to an array extension strategy?
We’re not wedded to the idea of Lightning solely being offered as cache extension for our Arrays but it is something we’re going to address right out of the gate. Lightning will be a competitive PCIe DAS device for local storage or external storage caching but we’ll differentiate with array cache extension technologies such as FAST.
Finally, you’ve run the Boston Marathon, are at EMC World and are then off to the Great Wall Marathon. I’ve heard you say Time Management is one of the secrets to making that all work. For those of us whom are chronically tardy and have developed the last minute cram into a fine art, where does one start down the effective time management path?
Well as I described in my book “The Juggling Act”…
Cheapest plug ever.
Thanks. Buy one for all your family & friends.
As I described in my book “The Juggling Act” a personal mission statement is a great place to start this journey. Get specific about who you are and what you want to do with your life. Based on that, begin that journey with specific goals. Next, get some help along the way. Mentors and accountability partners who are willing to join with you on the journey and help you be accountable to your mission statement.
Of course a dose of discipline and a dash of time management practices is pretty helpful as well.
