EMC’s Product Blitz – Not Just Marketing Spin?

When EMC announced a barrage of new storage products this week, it faced criticism for “bolting together” older products and updating software which was overdue for renewal.

But the company’s UK head told eWEEK Europe that EMC is best placed to capitalise on continued growth in storage demand, and will help deliver environmental savings in the sector.

Even in a recession, storage grows

“Even in a recession year, the amount of data created increased by 62 percent,” said Adrian McDonald, EMC’s vice president and general Manager for UK & Ireland.

EMC made a series of record attempts, including the world’s biggest ball of magnetic tape, and launched products which included an attack on a new sector – the VNXe product is aimed at small-to-medium businesses.

And the launch was driven by demand, said McDonald, quoting IDC estimates that the amount of data in the world (currently around 1.2 Zottabyte) doubles every 18 months, and will rise by 44 times before the year 2020. ( One Zottabyte is one sextillion bytes, or a billion Terabytes)

“There are subtexts to this – how much of that data is useful?” he asked. “The world is struggling from a commercial point of view, from a public sector point of view and even from a personal point of view. How do I focus on the stuff that is really important?”

Users will have to start prioritising and getting their data more under control: “I am not going to have tons more data farms, and can’t employ more people, in the credit crunch. The idea that you can continue that way has been put up to question.”

The answer is control: “You have to automate the management of information fundamentally more aggresively than you have before,” said McDonald.

A staged presentation in London illustrated this as storage management software seized control of a demonstration from EMC’s operating officer Pat Gelsinger claiming, in the manner of HAL from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, that it was better able to do the job than he was.

In future, block-based storage will shrink compared to file storage, which will grow for a short while then shrink too, said McDonald: “Ultimately everything is moving to object. The key thing is that it is stored in an open manageable form.”

What about the environment?

Mcdonald’s claim that the amount of storage will go up 44 times before 202o sits uncomfortably alongside the goal (now largely abandoned) to reduce emssions by 20 percent by that time. Does this mean the amount of power per Pbyte must go down 88-fold?

“We don’t measure Pbyte per Watt, or per square metre – which would go in step with it,” said McDonald. “But density is growing apace both in terms of format and density.” Gelsinger’s presentation claimed that EMC’s VMAX enterprise tiered storage products would collectively save 270MW this year, or enough to power 24,000 homes.

The death of tape … and disk?

And the death of tape will change the amount of resources in storage, he said. “As an archive medium, and as a storage medium of last resort, it is in decline, and that decline will continue apace.”

This will presumably be helped by migration paths. “The Data Domain product family will help people move to virtual tape environments,” he said:  “It is debatable whether there will be any tape at all in 2020.”

“Even disk will disppear ultimately as the cost equations come down,” he said.

EMC’s prospects

He’s happy that his company is growing at 21 percent, and is hoping to report around $16.9 billion in sales for its financial year 2010. “We are not lacking in ambition,” said McDonald, adding that in storage EMC is out performing IBM and HP.

This may be partly for the simple reason that EMC is more focused on storage which – as McDonald said – seems to be recession proof. But the company has clearly diversified a lot, with its investment in RSA Security and VMware.

As this diversification continues, how long can EMC avoid having to get into the services market in a big way, like every other vendor?

“We already have a large service business – almost by osmosis,” said McDonald. “There are very large numbers, but we don’t break them out. We are fundamentally a product company.”

Like its partner in the vBlocks cloud initiative, EMC wants to dominate its chosen area: “We want to be Cisco in our space,” said McDonald.

But it’s not going explicitly into services because it already partners will all the major services companies, even including storage rivals IBM and HP.

What about the tape ball?

We asked McDonald about the record breaking tape ball shown at the EMC event. Packing at least 1.8Pbyte into a 2m diatmeter ball actually could have applications we suggested.

“It might actually be better than a working storage array,” conceded McDonald. “Should you ever need to jump it.”