Odd place for EMC
EMC's location on the Gartner pictogram confuses me a tad. EMC's presence in the AFA market is entirely down to their purchase of XtremIO.
Effectively EMC spent a very large amount of money acquiring what is essentially a soft appliance. They then spent 2 years getting what was apparently a customer ready platform at the time of purchase ready for their customers finally releasing a product which was stripped of almost all features EMC's own high end Array customers would have expected to see in an Enterprise Array. No snapshots, no replication, no online expansion, no compression.
Replication as with IBM required an additional layer. Little additional functionality has been added since leaving XIO as one of the physically largest and lower performing AFA's. Not only is XIO large it is also not very Engineered, built as it is out of a stack of third party components, Melanox Switch, White label X86 servers and a disk enclosure EMC had lying around in their parts bin. It even has to include UPS's because to protect the XIO metadata all adding to the general sense of the devices being a bit of a lash up.