Classy Treat Part II: An unfair business advantage
By: Christophe Bertrand on May 27, 2009
Comments(4 ) | Contact Christophe
I was reading Claus’s recent blog entry and I wanted to provide a complementary perspective and highlight my take on how our recently-announced storage clustering capabilities generate business and operational advantages that are virtually (ah ah) impossible to match.
An easy one is that we’re essentially eliminating business impact associated with open systems applications downtime, and this is big news because it means this capability now extends beyond mainframe. Others can’t do that.
We’re competing with the pharmaceutical industry since we’re taking numerous headaches away. Specifically, we’re easing the cost and risk associated with data migration. Just think of the high number of hosts per storage frame you normally have to deal with, and how the ever-shrinking maintenance window is increasing IT costs to migrate enterprise storage system. This is more than a platform evolution, it’s a revolution in how our customers will be approaching the complex, risky and costly migration projects.
Another way to look at this, and actually another good operational advantage that can only be found on our platform is the drastic mitigation of application downtime risk. When you look at the research out there (reputable analysts, not marketing stuff that someone made up) you will see that primary reasons that affect data accessibility relate to environmental factors, human errors (you don’t want me managing your storage), and other external interruption incidents (too many possibilities to list).
The net, net, and yes, the holly grail: a reduction of CAPEX and OPEX and a maximum leverage of the storage platform. That’s how you bake business advantage in the infrastructure, and that’s also how IT can further extend their past storage investments…only one platform can do this, and it was never code-named after a feline lab experiment or a deep sea predator. Go figure…
Comments (4 )
Post a Comment
.
the storage anarchist on 27 May 2009 at 6:17 pm
Wow – Hitachi Math is nothing short of amazing.
In the midst of a global depression, and while your parent company bleeds Yen like water, you guys have the gall to require the purchase of 2x the capacity, 2x the controllers, using 2x the power, cooling and space – all just to get an HA solution?
And then you turn around and claim all this duplication of resources is a CAPEX and OPEX *REDUCTION*?
Not to mention REQUIRING synchronous replication SW for both arrays, AND for all hosts to run Hitachi path management software and with least 2 HBAs and to be RECONFIGURED (disruptively) to drive 1/2 of I/Os to each of the two arrays across each HBA.
Methinks you truly underestimate the intelligence of your audience. I doubt many will take your offer of Green Eggs and HAM seriously.
Forutnately for EMC customers, the platforms already deliver more than enough 9’s of availability, and PPME handles non-disruptive migrations into both DMX and V-Max. And V-Max changes everything, driving customers to reconsider the importance of storage virtualization altogether.
But…I guess when HDS/Hitachi were caught flat-footed by V-Max, you had to scramble to come up with SOMETHING to show you were still alive.
Nice try, but the world has already seen through your ruse…
But do tell us – when does all this (expensive) magic ship? I’ve heard your beta was slipped from May to August – any chance you’ve pre-announced an untested (and unproven) solution here?
the storage anarchist on 27 May 2009 at 6:18 pm
And it is a HOLY Grail, not a grail made of holly.
Barry Whyte on 27 May 2009 at 11:28 pm
“virtually (ah ah) impossible to match.”
You obviously haven’t heard of the SVC split cluster configurations we’ve been shipping for over a year then. Does the same thing but with a lot less cost… maybe I should write a post about it to enlighten you all.
Barry
Christophe Bertrand » Blog Archive » Wrestling with superior technology: French Samurai vs. Barry the Tigon on 28 May 2009 at 2:17 pm
[...] last entry generated some interesting comments from both EMC and IBM. Last night I ended up watching a few [...]