Buckets and Pipes: The Story of EMC Acquisitions
There is an interesting post by Chris Mellor at Channel Register entitled:
EMC plus Data Domain equals what exactly?
Or as I prefer to write it:
EMC plus Dat oin q wh xy?
But the past few weeks have been pretty interesting watching the bidding war between EMC and NetApp over Data Domain. With the final numbers in, it appears EMC are shelling out something north of $2.4B to acquire a technology they’ve already acquired in the form of Avamar. But is it worth $2.4B? I’m not sure, but that might be the war I would want to lose, but history tends to be the ultimate arbiter on such things; everything else is just opinion.
But it points to a stark difference between our two companies in terms of strategy, and that’s something I would like to cover: It’s all about integration.
Before I go further, I’d like to throw out a trivia question. Of all the dozens of storage companies EMC have purchased over the past 12-15 years, which is the only one that was actually integrated into EMC’s storage line? I may be wrong here, and I’m will to be corrected in public, but I can only think of one, and that’s PowerPath. All of the others seem to be more or less left as separate entities. Correct me if I’m wrong on this…
Now this is fine for the likes of VMware and SMARTS, but looking at the Hopkington storage lineup makes me think of a large warehouse with a leaky rooftop with a different bucket under each leak. We have DMX/V-Max, Clariiiioon, Celera, Centera, Iomega, and now Atmos. To manage this array of buckets requires multiple products as well. And then we have the appliance fraternity of Avamar, Kashya, and my favorite, InVista. Now add DataDomain to the mix. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few, but does anyone see a problem here? How many storage buckets does this world really need? That’s a rhetorical question of course, and I’m not suggesting it always has to be one, but each additional bucket not only complicates the scene, it begs for more plumbing!
Contrast this to HDS and you see an entirely different picture and strategy. We’re not adverse to acquisitions, but we are big fans of consolidation, integration, ease of use, and simplified environments, and we believe an integrated approach is the right approach. Whether mainframe, open systems, block, file, archival, and all tiers of storage, we pretty much have that under one (not-so-leaky) roof. Wanna blend a bunch of different storage types and tiers into a single manageable pool, and be able to non-disruptively move data amongst those types and tiers? We can even include EMC’s “buckets” into the mix!
So while EMC increases its “bucket count”, we simply add function and scalability to an ever-increasing pool managed by the same stack. OK, we still all have a bit to go but that’s clearly our direction.
But every time EMC acquires another company, I keep waiting for the follow-on announcement of what they will actually be doing with that technology, but it never seems to come.
Personally, I’d like to know that I can buy multiple storage types and tiers and have it all fit together…nicely.
Steve O'Donnell:
July 10th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
What about Data General and Clariion?
Claus:
July 14th, 2009 at 9:40 am
I still see Clariion as a separate product from the Symm/DMX line since they haven’t converged the management of the products. Still separate API’s and such for things like replication and there’s still the Navishere vs. ECC discussions. Then again, it’s only been a decade or so, so maybe they’ll get integrated soon!!
Anon Coward:
August 11th, 2009 at 7:26 am
- CX (maybe celerra) ECC integration has been around for ages
- CX/DMX replication using SANcopy
- RSA integration with DMX-4 authentication
- Replication Manager (need to confirm) works with Kashya
- EMC backup (name escapes me) works with Iomega
Having said that, whats wrong with having different buckets (ignoring your non-relevant comment about leaky roof)? Why can’t a company the size and clout of EMC manage that many buckets? Looks like a case of sour grapes to me.
Biju Krishnan:
October 1st, 2009 at 11:50 am
I’m a big fan of HDS hardware, but EMC is miles ahead in 2 aspects that I have experienced
1. Support. HDS support needs a complete revamp.
2. CLI for replication. In my opinion CCI should be completely re-written. Its such a pain to setup shadow Image or True copy using CCI.
Symcli is excellent, especially when it comes to replication.
HDS has its wins with hardware virtualization and replication.
RP is just stabilizing hence we will have to wait and watch.
Invista never seemed to be a winner.
Dedup at source is a good idea, but it adds to the admins overhead of managing additional client software. I wouldn’t buy this idea. A solution with Dilligent would work much better, and i have seen it work.
You need to also look at software from an admins perspective.
Years ago I implemented a SRM solution, only to realize that I had to rely on traditional software for many of the tasks. We could never complete the discovery of hardware.
Even today given a choice I would use Storage Navigator over HDvM, coz its much faster.
If the admin does not like it, there are less chances of the technology being accepted. So its for sure that EMC will have to integrate all these new buys into common framework, which can be managed from a central console.