Snide hashtags, F1 cars, death by PowerPoint: I'm sick of EMC hypegasms EMC has done it again and managed to turn what could have been an interesting product refresh into something that just irritates me and many others. It's ongoing teaser campaign started off badly when the storage giant's marketing types put up a "sneak preview" video and decided to have a dig at their lead competitor – then …
Well, seeing as you use the term "gamechanger" (sic) I guess you're in marketing.
Yes, I'm one of those you call a "noob" (dated slang for someone who is new to something). No, I'm not new to this. I'm not new to EMC. Yes, I know what they're doing and my guess is so does the article writer. There's actually very little to talk about with these announcements, which is why they're talking about it so much.
They're not the only ones like this. The whole industry is. EMC are just a whole degree worse than most. In fact, they're a paradigm shift apart. There's some marketing buzzword bollocks in context.
VNX2 is a marvel only for EMC.
Multicore for last 3 years on VNX1 was wrongly marketed if this is the first true deployment.
How different it is from old Flare? How does the IO path change if its a ground up design?
If ground up, why not Scale-out? May be another ground up code in next 3 years.
Active/Active controllers for flare luns only. Hardly any customer with flare LUNS!
Block dedupe was considered useless when others have it. So what's big?
Large companies have $$$ to market better. Technically nothing special.
EMC has some good products like Isilon, Datadomain and VMAX capacity tier.
New Bezel?
It is hard to blame a cat for attacking a mouse and so it is hard to blame a marketing department for a marketing campaign but having said that there is a bit of overkill to what is otherwise some interesting updates and improvements to their products. There does tend to be a climate around EMC of over enthusiastic self congratulation which can be a bit off putting and tedious at times but as long as they don't offer me a cup of their Kool-aid I can tolerate it.
Are the improvements revolutionary and game changing? Not really. Are they significant? Yes, especially to EMC customers. The big news would have been if EMC hadn't refreshed the VNX range. More for less is probably a bit boring for the marketing department but for customers that is what they are looking for.
It is a bit interesting or a least of note that almost all of the interesting storage news has been from startups so nice to see one of the larger players at least making an effort.
The thing is, practically every IT geek I know, is actively turned off by this type of marketing. Give us lots of tech specs, usage cases and so on and we'll consider your product, but if there's more glitz than information then we may very well assume that you're trying to hide something.
If you're going to market something the first thing is to decide the best way to reach your audience, and it looks like EMC's marketing have completely missed their audience.
Very slick site, but isn't 'speed to lead' something Tata Communications have been saying for, oh, a while now?
Case in point: http://formula1.tatacommunications.com
You'd hope EMC's marketing dolts would have cottoned-on, if, you know, they'd actually been to a GP anytime in the last 18 months...
Paris, for creativity.
EMC is their worst own enemy. This is NOT a major upgrade. Adding faster commodity processors, changing 10% of the 20 million lines of code (no exaggeration) to make it multi-core aware, and changing the name of the OS does nothing to address the fundamental flaw of the architecture. It is still a spindle-bound architecture and requires gobs of hardware/disk drives to provide sustained IOPS/throughput. It is also still a complex science experiment. At best, they've bought themselves a couple years so they can finally figure out how to truly leverage the new toys they've acquired - Isilon, Data Domain, XtremeIO, etc. Make no mistake, they are first and foremost a marketing machine.
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