Techno Musings

“Hitachi released a storage system called the Universal Storage Platform, USP.  Our customers were happy, they had found a way to improve the performance of their EMC Symmetrix systems: put a USP in front of the Symmetrix and virtualize it!  However EMC did not want to hear about this, and when Hitachi told the world about about the embedded virtualization in the USP, just EMC spirited all of the press and analysts away in a room and proceeded to cite “facts” about the architecture.  The most fascinating “fact” was that how Hitachi was doing virtualization was impossible as EMC could not make it work in their labs.  The press asked questions and Hitachi customers, not Hitachi, told the EMC-brainwashed press that if they would like they could come into the customers’ labs and see virtualization at work making the Symmetrix faster.”

The above is partially fictional of what happened only to protect the innocent and it is not far  from the truth.  Again today we are throwing down the gauntlet and announcing to the world our High Availability Manager which is  the first ever inter-controller clustering model on the market.  We did this all on the existing architecture as a new feature without a professional service engagement that necessitates the use of a forklift.

I know that recently there has been a lot of debate about how novel the V-MAX architecture is and how it does everything better than the USP-V including piloting the Space Shuttle.  However this great blog post points out that while EMC has made a big deal about the spiffy new thing they have a very very healthy roadmap to execute upon.  Below is a snipped summary from the above mentioned post.

For now, EMC has merely introduced a solid next-generation enterprise storage array. V-Max without FAST and scale-out is a nice-to-have refresh of the Symmetrix DMX-4. EMC should be especially respected for leaving all of the core Engenuity features like TimeFinder and SRDF intact, since this must have been no small feat. V-Max with FAST V1 is a more attractive proposition, but does not go that far beyond the capabilities of Symmetrix Optimizer. The same can be said of the 8-engine V-Max limit - it’s larger, but nothing to get too excited about.

So I’ll go back to some logic that I put out there some time ago: EMC’s marketing muscle is their most well oiled R&D, they are copying Hitachi, and far away from being able to deliver on what we have today.