Tech starfleet: Will EMC Federation survive a Tucci departure? Will the tripartite EMC federation set up by Joe Tucci survive his retirement in six months' time? He is the chairman and overall CEO of EMC. The three federated businesses are: EMC Information Infrastructure (EMC II) led by David Goulden who is also overall EMC CFO VMware led by Pat Gelsinger Pivotal led by Paul Maritz …
EMC's logistics and cost structure make competing in the cloud impossible. With big-iron under pressure from flash products and the move to low cost mid range arrays, the hardware business is on the downward slope. This leaves VMware as the core of a potential software empire in a few years time.
If VMware is divested, what is left behind is not too attractive, especially with the ODMs, WD and Seagate moving into the midrange array/appliance space.
Wow, suddenly I feel like the only guy who has any faith there is still money to be made over the next 10-15 years selling arrays. Maybe not a "growth" business anymore, but good bloody money nonetheless. And what prevents EMC from growing new businesses? ScaleIO anyone?
There's more to EMC than arrays. Even if they have to fire a bunch of hard-core hangers on to be able to realise it at a corporate culture level.
I visit IT shops at the rate of two or three a week. "We're an EMC shop" is frequently heard. Do they piss people off? Yes. Are their arrays perfect? No. Are they the largest storage company on the planet? Absolutely. But for how long?
History will show that the biggest mistake that EMC and NetApp made was not embracing solid state storage soon enough. Some of the upstart flash vendors, particularly SolidFire, have better technology already and are nimble enough to continue to adopt to the next generation of flash and then capacitor based RAM disk. Flash is approaching the price point of spinning rust media now, and prices will get lower. Resistance is futile.Your spinning rust drives WILL BE assimilated.
NetApp seems hopelessly lost with FlashRay, which appears to be a year late and XtremeIO obviously has a ways to go to be enterprise ready - their latest upgrade requires a wipe and restore to install!
Are these two vendors avoiding all flash arrays to protect their legacy spinning disk products? I believe that's a clear YES - and people are still buying, because they don't know any better.
I'm waiting until I go into a business and hear, "We're a SolidFire shop." They're out there, and THAT's the company where I'll invest my hard earned dollars!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
