EMC and the Private Cloud

I missed last year's EMC Industry Analyst meeting, and this one was completely different from 2007. Two years ago it felt like EMC was a manufacturer of complex storage boxes that dabbled in software and applications as needed. In 2009, from Joe Tucci down, EMC seems very much like a systems company, and one that understands (at least strategically) that software is very much a key part of its future. To be sure, EMC is still very much a storage company and makes money by selling boxes. But a modern storage system is mostly complex software, and (it turns out) sometime in the past EMC moved to using X86 instead of alternatives like MIPS or PowerPC. In a virtualized world, it may well make more sense to package storage functionality as virtual machines than as boxes in the infrastructure. In fact, Chad Sakac, EMC's VP of VMware Technology Alliances, in his demo showed off some virtual Clarion systems running on the virtual storage fabric which is much easier (still not simple) if it is already running on an X86 platform. In his presentation, Brian Gallagher, the head of the Symmetrix business, let drop that he had 1,600 engineers, all software engineers (and all writing X86 code to boot). EMC seems to clearly understand that they need to make their customers succeed with storage for virtualized environments, even if that journey includes selling more software than hardware and aggressively bringing the cost of storage down. In the last year EMC introduced FAST (fully automated storage tiering) that lets flash and SATA drives be mingled with the traditional expensive drives in a Symmetrix system. The results can be dramatic: cheaper, faster and lower power. Next EMC has their sights set on what they call storage "federation" — how many block storage systems can be linked within data centers and across data centers including capabilities like storage motion to match application motion, and FAST and storage federation are essentially just software. Managing data within and across public and private clouds is certainly a key part of the vision of utility and cloud computing. In contrast to Cisco with significant businesses in both enterprise and service providers, EMC's bread is very much buttered by Enterprise sales, and their current focus is very much on the journey to the "private" cloud — the use of virtualization to evolve enterprise data centers to utility, self-service computing. I personally agree that this is the most exciting story (not the public cloud). EMC seems to have set the stage for a remarkable metamorphosis from the big box past to something quite different. Of course setting the stage and giving the performance are quite different, so only time will tell.