Storagezilla

Joe at UW

The most notable statistic from the Joe Tucci talk was the massive investment that EMC is making mergers and acquisitions. He said over the next 5 years, EMC will spend $10.5B in R&D – this number alone is amazingly large -- but what I found really startling was they expect to spend even more purchasing companies. They expect to spend $14.0B on M&A during this same period. That’s nearly $3B/year from just a single company. Amazing.

 

With many large companies increasingly looking to the startup community for new ideas and innovation, there is incredible opportunity for startups.  Joe emphasized the opportunity, saying that Washington in general and especially the University of Washington will likely be the source of many of these new companies. As large companies lean more on the startup community for new ideas, products, and services, it’s a good time to be starting a company.

via perspectives.mvdirona.com

I watched this talk and thought James wasn't paying attention.
Silly me, the head was down as he typing up his notes.

Joe goes to Seattle.

Joe Tucci at Pioneer Square

Calling the Isilon acquisition “a coup for the company” Joe travelled to Seattle to open the new Isilon Centre of Excellence in Pioneer Square.

Isilon grew over 100% year over year in the last quarter it’s true scale out single file system design moved beyond the Big Data verticals the company started in and into the mainstream horizontal NAS market. Isilon is a technology everyone wins with. I’m going into more and more accounts and watching as it consolidates & replaces groups of old era clustered Active/Active NAS controllers. I’m seeing Isilon growing in the field as it happens and it’s picking up speed.

EMC is heavily funding Isilon development and what’s coming is incredibly sexy. By increasing EMC’s investment in Seattle, home of Microsoft, Amazon.com and the University of Washington,  not only is Joe keeping the Isilon engineering team intact but he’s looking to greatly expand the EMC team from Seattle’s talent pool and create new jobs in the Seattle area.

Voice of the European customer: Backup & Recovery for VMware.

--Krzysztof Waszkiewicz, VMware/WINTEL Server Support Team Manager, Bank Zachodni WBK

"In addition to drastically reduced backup windows due to Avamar's highly effective de-duplication, we find Avamar's simplicity and flexibility to be most impressive as a solution for the VMware platform. We have the flexibility to do both image and file level backups and we've found it to be equally cost effective for both our VMware and physical environments. In addition, a wide portfolio of plug-ins are available, which encompass a broad range of applications and operating system clients. Our Avamar implementation was simple and trouble-free, and now so are our backup and recoveries."

Complete Tape Elimination

The City of Oulu in Finland, population 141,671, had been backing up to tape. As they virtualized servers, their daily incremental backups began taking 12-14 hours and full backups were running through the entire weekend. It was fast becoming clear that, for their growing virtual environment, tape was no longer viable. To meet all their requirements, City of Oulu implemented a combination of EMC NetWorker® unified backup software, Avamar and Data Domain® dedpulication storage systems.

--Marko Niskala, Infrastructure Manager of City of Oulu

"With tape, we simply had no backup window left. With EMC, we've successfully solved our backup issues and reduced our data protection costs by 28% in the process. We are now 70% virtualized and have fast backups we can count on."

Eighty Percent Virtualized

UK-based Derby College, one of the largest further education colleges in the country, had tape-based backup processes that had become unmanageable and were inhibiting the completion of their server consolidation project. Tape backup and tape management were manually intensive and were consuming one full-time employee's efforts. Daily incremental backups were taking as long as 24 hours, and restores were taking as long as three days factoring in tape transportation services. Then Derby switched to EMC Avamar for backup of its now 80% virtualized environment. Today, the college performs full daily backups in only 3-4 hours and enjoys rapid restores and dramatically reduced management time.

--Ian McCormick, IT Infrastructure Manager for Derby College

"Backup at Derby College has gone from a full time job to essentially a no-time job. Our daily backup window time has been reduced by a factor of six, and time spent on managing our backups is negligible- basically more of a monitoring process. In addition, restores are simple- literally a few clicks and we're done. Avamar performs as promised, which is a testament to EMC. EMC has the expertise to make sure products like Avamar work well with VMware, and there's a significant level of comfort for us in that."

via www.emc.com

Like Hannibal Smith I love it when a plan comes together.

I went through this story with 350 to 400 of my closest friends in EMEA Sales just last week at their 2012 kick off event and fully expect them to carry the message forward to all their customers. But it's so much better when other customers who are living it today say it in their own words.

NetWitness Spectrum | Analytics for Network Security

For each piece of executable content found on the network, Spectrum will ask thousands of questions concerning the file. At a high level, Spectrum:

• Mimics the techniques of leading malware analysts by asking thousands of questions about an object and all of its related network behavior, without requiring a signature or a known “bad” action.
• Leverages NetWitness Live by fusing and triangulating information from leading threat intelligence and reputation services to assess, score, and prioritize risks.
• Utilizes NetWitness NextGen’s pervasive network monitoring capability for full network visibility and extraction of all content — executable and metadata — across all protocols and applications.
• Provides transparency and efficiency to malware analytic processes by delivering complete answers to security professionals, including a wealth of detailed supporting data, such as: intelligence fusion, sandboxing, correlation, and scoring options that are designed for diverse environments and rapidly evolving threats.

via www.netwitness.com

NetWitness Spectrum is a direct answer to the experience EMC had with Advanced Persistent Threats and works under the assumption that you've already been compromised. When you assume you've already been compromised you move directly to identification & resolution. Spectrum focuses on analytical identification the results of which can help security staff decide on the best resolution.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think this way of doing things is going to be the direction RSA heads in with it's future product development and offering loadout.

Channel exclusive, the Data Domain DD160.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) is continuing its assault on the SMB storage channel business with this week's release of its first entry-level, stand-alone Data Domain deduplication appliance.

 

That appliance, the DD160, is also a first for EMC in that it is the first Data Domain model designed for sale only through indirect channels.

 

The DD160 is an entry-level dedupe appliance with a total of either 1.6 TBs or 4.0 TBs of physical internal storage capacity. However, that 4.0 TBs stores between 40 TBs and 195 TBs of data after it is deduplicated, with the actual amount of logical capacity depending on how amenable the data is to deduplication.

 

It can ingest data at a rate of up to 1.1 TBs per hour, EMC said.

via www.crn.com

 

I mentioned in a previous post on the VNXe that EMC was going to do more with the Channel going forward.

 

Well here's a Data Domain system with a $10K price point which is only available through EMC Channel partners joining the VNXe, which was recently voted CRN's most innovate storage technology, as a Channel exclusive and not available to the EMC direct sales force.

 

The company is hyper-focused on signing up new partners. Even with application aware primary storage & inline deduplicated protection storage now covered there is more to come from EMC for solution providers.

Strength.

Having seen previous Oracle OpenWorld Keynotes I’ll admit to being a bit anxious when I heard that for the first time since 2004 EMC had a keynote slot.

To paraphrase from Twitter, I was afraid we’d go to OpenWorld on our hands & knees like many other people who’ve trod that stage. We can all think of a partner of two who’s gotten up on their hind legs, phoned in why you should use Oracle with their offerings and then watched as they were whipped in public by the host in subsequent sessions.

Since strength, who has it and who lacks it, is a critical part of any Oracle relationship dynamic you don’t want to be the one in the room to lack for it or the Shark from Redwood Shores will rip you to pieces.

What I saw today was a display of strength and it was commented on in the Twitter feedback during the keynote.

There was a bit of a disappointed sigh when Joe finished up the business portion and passed over to product. A different audience from the speeds, feeds and tech fanatics who hang out at EMC World, VMworld and the other industry shoes we’re used to. The room wanted more on strategy, opportunity and the changes happening in IT. That’s not my area of interest personally but it’s obvious it is an area of interest for a number of OpenWorld attendees.

While there was little new in the keynote for anyone who’s been at EMC World, Lightning is now in widely deployed Beta and moves forward towards availability to the EMC Direct Sales force (And I assume the Channel) Joe & Pat pushed the value of doing business with EMC in front of an audience many of whom don’t today or may never have done any business with EMC.

The message was clear, EMC & Oracle agree on some things but differ on others. Here’s what we differ on and we’re going to show how and why we differ right now.

We will cooperate but we will compete. Hard.

The ability to pitch to that audience is worth the effort and there was no playing safe or redacting parts of the message as to not to tread on the host’s toes.

With the on stage triumvirate of Joe, Pat and Chad mentioning and showing VMware products, SpringSource Frameworks, Greenplum Analytics, EMC Storage with Compute capability (I didn’t say EMC Servers) all of which compete with Oracle offerings, will EMC be invited back?

I’d say the company stands a better chance for a repeat performance than those who’ve toadied to the host in previous years and then found themselves in Oracle’s gun sights when they’ve been tagged as vulnerable and weak.