Dicing with data
Published: 14 Jan 2004 16:35 GMT
That would lead to more efficient storage.
Yes. It's just one piece. There are other things that are there but not used enough. There are easier ways to provision. Provisioning -- which means assigning jobs to specific hardware -- is very difficult. To add 200GB of storage, you have to go through a lot of steps. We have some tools to automate that and those tools will get a lot more automated as time goes on.
To what extent is ILM something that customers are really calling for versus something that you and other industry players are using as a kind of marketing slogan to try to spur excitement in the industry?
Customers are asking for all the elements. Do customers want tiered storage? Yes. Do customers need to have mobility to move the information across the tiered storage? Yes. Are they asking for those things? Yes. Do customers want a central point to manage all the information? Yes. Do customers want more metadata about their information to make better informed decisions and policies? Yes.
So every one of these things they're crying for. So basically we put that under an umbrella called information lifecycle management.
How is what you are doing different from other companies offering ILM products or strategies?
It's the most complete, right? If you go to the first layer -- the first layer I defined as tiered arrays or tiered storage, right? There is no other vendor that has the vast breadth of a product line that we have. The high end of storage, the midtier, the serial ATA, and the ability on the same array to put a rack of fibre channel, another rack of fibre channel, two racks of ATA, a rack of fibre channel, three racks of ATA. Mix and match anyway you want.
There is no other vendor that has that plus the full array of the NAS heads that we have. You know we have the NetWin series, which we did in conjunction with Microsoft. We have our own Celerra series, again we have the Centrea built exclusively for fixed content and immutability.
Number two, you go to the second line, which is the protection and the data mobility. Again we have more ways of moving information than any other company, by far. And then of course more ways of dialling in more levels of protection than any other company.
Then you move to the management. EMC ControlCentre has significant share out there, almost 50 percent share. And you back that with (the fact that) this is a company of substantial size with substantial financial resources that is fully dedicated to this, as opposed to a piece of the company. So you put those things all together and I think that's our advantage.
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