It’s been just over week since EMC announced the new VNX Series live from Milan, home of the Italian Grand Prix. Wow, what an event: Speed to lead, Formula One, Lotus, tire-changing pit stops, and, by the way, EMC’s most significant product announcement of the year!
Now that I’m back from Milan, I’ve had some time to reflect on what this announcement means to our customers, our partners, and the industry.
This announcement – referred to as “EMC’s midrange megalaunch” – was specifically focused on changing the game in the midrange storage market and how midrange storage impacts our users’ applications – be that Oracle, SharePoint, their virtual and cloud infrastructure, SAP, or any other applications they use to run their businesses. After speaking with hundreds of customers and analysts, it is clear that the midrange has forever changed the application landscape.
Midrange customers all face a common set of challenges – tons of data growth, flat budgets, and pressures to remain competitive. Virtualization and the cloud have been key enablers to increase efficiency and agility. As they now look to scale their virtual infrastructure, they need a storage solution that can handle their ever-increasing mixed application workloads – OLTP, data warehousing, e-mail, and file-based applications. And one that doesn’t break their budget, while delivering the availability, performance, and reliability their applications and the business demands.
The good news is that there is a perfect storm of three disruptive technologies – Intel multi-core chips, virtualization/cloud, and flash – all of which can help customers handle these common challenges.
The new VNX is all about leveraging and combining these disruptive technologies to meet our midrange customer requirements well into the future. With VNX, our customers now have a new storage system with patented MCx multicore optimization software and FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) that unleashes the full potential of flash within their arrays – while getting more for less – optimizing for low $/GB and low $/IOP in a single unified platform centered around providing the best ROI for our customers. With this revolutionary solution, our customers are truly set for the future – and can take advantage of upcoming advancements from Intel, virtualization and cloud infrastructure, and flash technology providers. The economics of the storage and IT industries will continue to drive down the costs of these technologies. EMC will continue to provide the secret sauce – flash-optimized intelligent software and hardware.
I would like to give a special thanks to our partners around the world. This announcement set a new precedent – where EMC announced WITH our channel partners at over 12 locations around the world. Our partners are vital to understanding our customers’ businesses to ensure they build/maintain competitive advantage. In fact, the vast majority of our midrange solutions are delivered and serviced by our partners worldwide.
Oh, and how cool was that VNX5400 Lotus F1 Limited Edition? Check it out at the new EMC Store.
