EMC World 2016 Summary

Day 1

Dell EMC Merger

Obviously the elephant in the room this year was the impending merger between Dell and EMC. This is one of the largest technology mergers in history and will reshape both companies. As the transaction has not yet closed, EMC was unable to comment on many of the details of the transaction. However, they were able to discuss the motivations behind it and some of the market implications.

As converged systems and cloud infrastructure become more pervasive, the combination of Dell’s compute capabilities and EMC’s storage and software capabilities will provide the combined company with the tools to compete in the evolving market. So, from a simple product perspective, this merger makes sense, however, historically Dell has excelled in the high volume, transactional SMB segment of the market, while EMC traditionally been much more successful in the high touch, high margin enterprise market. To address the differences in the cultures, Dell plans on creating two separate businesses. The end user computing business, that relies on high volume, low margin transaction sales will be based in Austin; while the enterprise business, which requires higher touch and longer sales cycles will be based in Boston. Both business will report directly to Michael Dell.

Neuralytix believes that this is the only approach that can be successful for Dell and EMC. The reason for this is the culture clash. One of the most difficult aspects to manage during a large acquisition in the various corporate cultures. By separating the two businesses, Dell and EMC can maintain the cultures that are the most appropriate for the respective markets. Different performance metrics can be employed for each business. Neuralytix also believes that EMC’s previous experience with operating disparate business units will prove to be valuable in the integration.

Storage Announcements

In addition to the discussion of the merger, EMC provided an update on the evolution and strategy for their data center portfolio. EMC’s strategy for the modern datacenter is founded on four key elements: flash, cloud enablement, scale-out, and software-defined.

EMC announced several new storage offerings:

• Unity

• EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management

• ViPR 3.0 Controller

• Virtustream Storage Cloud

Unity: With a laser focus on flash, EMC announced Unity, a midrange 2U all flash array. Unity will support block, file, and VMware VVols. Starting at under US$20,000, Unity can scale from 25 drives to 1,000 drives, providing up to 3PB of storage. EMC was clear to state that this will be a volume product. With the pending acquisition with Dell and the new types of customers that the acquisition will bring, namely SMB and midmarket customers, Neuralytix believes that this product was designed to address that market in mind. Neuralytix believes that the new Unity storage product will have a great impact on those customers who wanted to buy EMC, but felt that it is price prohibitive. Additionally, at the price point that EMC is promising for Unity, it allows EMC to compete with startup all flash vendors, as well as hybrid storage vendors.

EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management: EMC’s enterprise copy data management capabilities not only manages secondary, or archived data, but will now keep track of primary copies to optimize the number of copies of data that is kept by customers. This way, customers can align their business objectives with the redundancy that meets corporate and regulatory compliance.

ViPR 3.0 Controller: To meet the scale-out and software-defined needs of the modern datacenter, EMC announced that ViPR 3.0, its software-defined storage (SDS) controller will now allow any third-party array to be supported using its new software development kit (SDK). Neuralytix believes that broader support of third-party storage arrays better reflects the ideals of what SDS is designed to do.

Virtustream Storage Cloud: As cloud enablement is a key element to EMC’s vision of the modern datacenter, EMC announced the Virtustream Storage Cloud, which is a hyperscale object store, built using its Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS). This will allow customers to backup to an enterprise grade cloud; as well as providing capabilities such as archiving to an enterprise grade cloud.

Overall, Neuralytix believes these announcements align very well with its merger with Dell, and expect that these capabilities will be attractive to Dell’s customer base.

MyService360

In many cases the success or failure of enterprise technology solutions is dependent on the services the vendor chooses to wrap around the products. Enterprise IT products and data centers are highly complex and require a considerable amount of maintenance and ongoing support. The introduction of MyService360, which is included with any current maintenance contract, attempts to provide customers with a simpler way to monitor and support the EMC infrastructure. While this is not a new concept in tech support, Neuralytix believes this offering has 2 main advantage. The first is the software does not need to be installed in the customer’s infrastructure. This is an advantage as the installation of yet another support and management tool is not something that most customers are interested in undertaking. The second advantage is the tool looks like it is easy to use and configure. Tools that are difficult to use and configure are often not deployed as widely throughout the customer base.

Day 1 Conclusion

In closing, Neuralytix was pleased with the announcements that EMC made today. However, given that they could not discuss many of the pressing questions regarding the upcoming acquisition, what they were able to discuss showed that they were starting down a positive path. Only time will tell if they are able to continue in that direction.

Day 2

Joe Tucci’s farewell

One of the key events of EMC World 2016 is the pending merger with Dell. The strategic portion of the merger was covered yesterday. Today Joe Tucci, took time for an analyst Q and A session for the last time as the CEO of EMC. From an analyst perspective, Q & A sessions with Joe were always a highlight of EMC World. He is one of the more direct executives that the analyst community interacted with and was considered a straight shooter be many of the analysts present. This feeling was plainly evident in the questions that Joe was asked. In addition to the Q & A, Joe too the time for photos with all of the analysts present.

From a personal perspective, Neuralytix would like to take this opportunity to wish Joe all the success in his future endeavors. Covering EMC over the past several years has been fun and Joe’s directness and willingness to address the hard questions that analysts ask was contributed to the enjoyment of covering EMC.

Storage Drill-Down

Today, from a product side, EMC drilled down further on each of the announcements made yesterday. EMC emphasized its idea of “The Modern Datacenter” that is made up of four pillars

EMC World The Modern Data CenterFigure 1: EMC’s vision of the modern datacenter (Source: EMC)

The 90-minute general session demonstrated a number of different technologies and their applicability to The Modern Datacenter. Among the demonstrations, two drill-downs were standouts, while the other demos reiterated announcements made earlier in the year. Further, EMC reiterated its emphasis on flash, with EMC explaining that XtremIO, VMAX All Flash, and Unity All Flash all played an important role for the modern datacenter. While XtremIO is well understood as an all flash product, EMC reiterated its announcement of the All Flash VMAX from earlier in the year.

Unity

A lot of time was spent on explaining Unity. Unity is a dual controller design, but is not a derivative of VNX. In fact, much of the inspiration behind Unity came from the lower-end VNXe. Unity is available in one of four configurations: All Flash, Hybrid, Converged and Virtual and at launch each shelf will support 80TB. EMC explained that the hybrid version of Unity will have a starting list price of around US$10,000. All versions are designed to run mixed workloads and by the end of 2016, EMC expects that the capacity per Unity will reach 320TB of TLC NAND flash.

Depending on the capacity required, there will be four configurations. The entry level having support for up to 150 drives, while the largest configuration will support 1,000 drives. Comparing a VNX 5800F with a Unity box, EMC suggested that the Unity box will provide 3x the performance at half the cost. This makes Unity highly competitive against other all flash arrays on the market. Additionally, the Unity box will come native with snapshots, replication, controller based encryption, with compression to come later in the year.

Unity is based on a scale-out design. The demo of the GUI indicated a single click approach to join an additional Unity node. Combined with EMC’s data protection suite and integration with Virtustream’s storage cloud, this will “cloud enable” Unity.

Finally, one of the most glaring changes in the way Unity was designed is the user interface. The GUI was not only practical, but also very easy to use. Neuralytix research shows that VNX customers had not been happy with the Unisphere management platform. In our conversation with a customer who beta tested Unity, the customer felt that the capabilities and ease of use are far superior that previous EMC midrange products.

Copy Data Management

EMC’s new enterprise copy data management product (eCDM) was also highlighted during today’s drill-down. eCDM was able to discover the number of redundant copies of primary, backup and archived data. Using its analytics, and customer parameters, eCDM was able to recommend to customers an ideal number of copies. Customers could also define different service levels – Gold, Silver, and Bronze in terms of the criticality, and sensitivity they have to redundant data.

MyService360

EMC provided a deeper dive into MyService360 features and functionality. One of the aspects that Neuralytix believed would be a strong selling point for the service was the intuitive interface. After participating in a demo this proved to be true. Drilling into greater detail on service requests, health checks, and other aspects of the infrastructure proved to be simple. Further the graphics and “look and feel” of the product was very polished. While this may seem trivial, Neuralytix believes that it is not. The main reason for this is the ability for a variety of personnel in the organization to use the tool. Throughout the IT industry there is an evolving trend to use analytic tools that are connected to live data for senior management presentations rather than capturing data, moving into a general purpose analysis and visualization tool like Excel and then creating slides. This process generally consumes considerable time and resources and results in the presentation of old data. By using analytic tools like MyService360 or SAP HANA, executives alleviate that problem. Further, using live data allows real time investigations into the infrastructure. While Neuralytix does not believe that MyService360 will be used for the same type of board level presentations that review financial performance or sales data, the presentation capabilities will still be very valuable to customers.

While this is all positive, in several customer interviews and discussion there was one concern that was raised; the data integrity. In some cases, EMC will need to clean some of the installed base data currently maintained by both customers and EMC. While this is not a massive challenge, for the tool to be as useful as it could be, the underlying data need to be accurate.

Customer reaction

In addition to the presentations from EMC, Neuralytix was able to talk to several customers in the event. Most of the reaction was positive and customers called out EMC as a leader in support and management services, product reliability, and performance. However, there was one criticism, specifically, that the recent product announcements were causing some confusion. Several of the products were blurring the lines between product categories. So while in the past, there were more clear distinctions which made the product selection process for the customers easier. Now, the choices are close enough that determining which product is right for which application has become more confusing. Neuralytix believes that this is not a significant problem but it will require that EMC spend time educating the sales representative and the customers to ensure that customers are selecting the right architecture for their needs

Day 3

Migration to software

While IT infrastructure is clearly an important aspect of customer’s overall IT and business strategy, most companies are mainly interested in applications. The reason for this is it is the applications that keep the businesses running. The extent that infrastructure is important is as due to the need for that infrastructure to run applications. Most companies now understand the importance software and this can be seen by GE’s advertising campaign that highlights the software development efforts – GE now considers itself a digital company that is also an industrial company. So, while Neuralytix does not believe that every company is not a software company, we do agree that every company needs to understand and be able to leverage advances in technology, specifically software to enhance their market position. Further, a critical part of leveraging the importance of technology is deploying a platform for the development efforts for their software. This is space that EMC wants to occupy with Pivotal and VMWare.

Pivotal and VMWare are looking to become the platforms that customers can use to leverage the emerging technologies that can drive their business forward. Specifically, the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT), require a hybrid cloud platform on which new applications will be built. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VMware IaaS offerings are the building blocks for the EMC platform offerings. Neuralytix believes that while EMC does have strong offerings in this space, they are participating in a crowded market as a variety of competitors are vying to become the platform for the emerging market.

In order to be digital company, it requires two critical components – data on which derive innovation and insight, and the software needed to process the data to achieve the desired result.

Announcements

On this, the third day of announcements, EMC focused on the Data Lake, Open source, Software Defined and Native Hybrid Cloud. Each a product of the Emerging Technologies Division led by CJ Desai.

As we enter the second generation of the Data Lake concept, EMC has, to date started 45 open source projects with 1,100 contributors. The Open source projects focus around deployment and provisioning, and represents a positive start to EMC’s commitment to leveraging the developer community to help accelerate developments to its products.

One such project is the Open source project named CoprHD. CoprHD is the open source version of ViPR. In fact, several contributions from the open source community made it into ViPR 3.0.

Continuing its on its theme of Software Defined, EMC announced IsilonSD Edge. This is a software defined version of EMC’s Isilon storage system, and is meant for deployment at smaller remote offices, permitting the management of up to 35TB of data. This provides seamless single namespace across an entire organization.

Finally, EMC announced its Native Hybrid Cloud. Leveraging VxRACK, it combines open source, software defined and cloud enablement into a single VxRACK node, named Neutrino. Neutrino will enable customers to load a preconfigured, pretested OpenStack environment that EMC has curated, and where EMC will continue to optimize, test and configure the distribution, and include ScaleIO software defined storage capabilities into a developer ready Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Additionally, the Neutrino node can also be configured with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) to provide a fully tested and warrantied Platform as a Service (PaaS).

The capabilities of the Neutrino node can also be made available in the Virtustream cloud with PCF pre-integrated. This gives developers the ability to write code that can span seamlessly between on-premise and in-cloud.

Conclusion

Although EMC World 2016 was overshadowed by the “elephant in the room” – the Dell EMC merger; EMC still made several key announcements and enhancements to its product line. The question for the new Dell|EMC company is how to consolidate its storage platforms. Neuralytix research shows at least a dozen disparate storage platforms between the two companies. This will no doubt provide customers with significant choice, but also make it difficult to help customers choose the most appropriate product for their needs.

However, Neuralytix believes these are short-term issues that will ultimately result in a seamless transition between two great IT companies into a single entity that will have best of breed capabilities from client computing to enterprise computing.

By Matt Healey with insight from Ben Woo

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