DSSD President quits Dell EMC The Register's storage desk has learned that DSSD President Bill Moore has left Dell EMC. EMC acquired DSSD in 2014, when the prey company had revealed its intentions to build rack-scale flash storage rigs, but was still in stealth mode. Moore co-founded the company, along with Jeff Bonwick who remains a VP and CTO at Dell …
I haven't heard a PEEP about DSSD from Dell EMC since the merger. Its not on their current list of bonus commissions... so their sales force isn't touching it. Add on top its a very niche product right now, and there are only going to be a handful of super performance users willing to pay the $1M entry level price for it. Support is going to be next to non-existent from a field perspective, don't trust the DELL / EMC tech they dispatch when it fails. Unless its a main stream product, they are basically sending out a warm body that is going to call the lab the minute they are onsite.
That's exactly what you want in a new, high-end product; a warm body who calls the experts instead of faking competency. And there are big-time experts right next to the lab - this product isn't handled by general EMC Tech Support. True, it's a niche product. Not designed or intended for general file and print service, and it's priced for what it does; blazingly fast data transfers. As long as DEMC doesn't make the mistake of diluting / dumbing it down for generic use, it'll probably be a winner.
The two being the all flash choices from Dell | EMC, Symmetrix and CLARiiON, both of which are older than 15K HDDs ... the safety scissors version of leading edge. [I am excluding XtremIO as Dell don't seem to be pushing it following the alleged data integrity incidents already covered on El Reg.]
XtremIO all flash
DSSD
Equallogic PS series all flash
Compellent SC series all-flash
PowerVault all-flash
Unity All flash
VMAX all flash
VSAN all flash ready nodes
VX:RAIL all flash
VX:RACK all flash
XC series all flash
I count eleven.
I'm not sure what you're talking about when you mention Symmetrix and Clariion. Neither product have been sold for donkey's years. VMAX succeeded Symmetrix and VNX succeeded Clariion several generations ago.
VMAX is Symmetrix and Unity is CLARiiON. Yes they have a load of other dead products but these are the two that will be pushed going forward.
XtremIO all flash - broken
DSSD - exotic niche that might get canned
Equallogic PS series all flash - dead
Compellent SC series all-flash - no future
PowerVault all-flash - no future
Unity All flash - Being pushed
VMAX all flash - Being pushed
VSAN all flash ready nodes - Not strictly speaking a storage product
VX:RAIL all flash - Not strictly speaking a storage product
VX:RACK all flash - Not strictly speaking a storage product
XC series all flash - Not strictly speaking a storage product
I agree it can be exhausting when EMC introduces the 17 people needed to explain their various storage offerings, and shambolic when the start to fight each other.
DEMC is consolidating their alphabet-soup of storage lines. This isn't a bad thing. DSSD's moved to the Server division as a rack-scale product (make sense if you consider the PCI/NVMe transport). Not exactly an unheard-of niche, and again, if they focus on speed and reliability instead of piling on features, this may be a contender.
On the Storage side, VMAX takes the top end of the enterprise data center. Unity takes the midrange. XtremIO becomes the wild-card; it's got some serious growing up to do, but it'll eventually be in a position to bridge the gap between the other two.
Doesn't sound like all that weird a strategy to me, and it might serve to cut that 17-person circular firing squad down to a reasonable group.
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