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Introduction
The show that originally started as the EMC Enterprise Wizards Conference in 2001 is running May 8 to May 11 in Las Vegas under a new name, Dell EMC World.
Well, it's not entirely a new name. Dell World rebranded as Dell EMC World in October 2016, in the wake of Dell's $67 billion acquisition of the world's largest storage vendor. But the May 2017 show is the lineal descendant of the Wizards Conference and the long-running EMC World, and marks the seventh straight year the event is being held in Las Vegas.
Many of the themes at Dell EMC World 2017 will be familiar for an IT/storage conference these days. You'll hear a lot about hyper-converged infrastructure, cloud storage and flash arrays. More traditional storage topics, such as data protection, disk arrays and storage management will also be covered, although pushed into the background a bit.
And because Dell Technologies extends beyond storage, the conference will cover servers, virtualization, DevOps, security, internet of things, software-defined data centers and cloud computing.
The speaker list includes Michael Dell; Dell EMC storage leaders David Goulden, Chad Sakac and Jeff Boudreau; VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger; and industry gurus Andy Bechtolsheim and Tim Berners-Lee.
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We'll be reporting the latest news from the show on SearchStorage and our other TechTarget sites. To prepare for Dell EMC World 2017, check out what's been happening with the IT giant since the merger, as well as all the news from EMC World 2016.
Dell EMC World 2017: Viewing storage from all angles
There was plenty of discussion at Dell EMC World 2017 about the vendor's cloud storage strategy. Dell EMC President David Goulden urged attendees to envision all their storage as a cloud, regardless of whether it resides in an on-premises array or is shipped off site.
"The first part of our strategy is to support a multicloud world to enable your companies to make the digital transformation. The second part of our strategy concerns the infrastructure the cloud runs on," Goulden said.
But Dell EMC did not provide much clarity on how users should distinguish between its overlapping -- and sometimes redundant -- cloud platforms.
"We are product-oriented today, and that's a weakness," said Sam Grocott, Dell EMC's senior vice president of marketing for storage and data protection. "We
In this e-guide
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have so many ways to tier data [to the cloud] simply, but it can be confusing. We are making it a priority to work on that across storage and data protection."
One way for Dell EMC to remove confusion around its cloud strategy would be to make it more specific.
"I would say Dell EMC's cloud storage strategy is a bit foggy. They have some work to do in the area of marketing and communications. They should cut through the buzzword bingo and help customers see opportunity," said Greg Schulz, a senior advisory analyst and founder at consulting firm StorageIO in Stillwater, Minn.
Even people who have embraced the Dell EMC cloud may find the term a distracting buzzword. Ted Newman, head of cloud services for U.K.-based Royal Bank of Scotland, said RBS built an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service framework on top of Dell EMC Vblock storage. But despite his title and job function at RBS, Newman said he prefers the term "IT as a service" to cloud.
"I've been over the term 'cloud' for about five years now," Newman said. "What we wanted to do was take infrastructure out of the equation."
He said RBS uses the term "enterprise cloud platform," which he called "the IT equivalent of 'Bob.' It's a very generic name."
Here is our attempt to shed some light on the Dell EMC clouds.
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Virtustream data centers host new cloud
Virtustream is Dell EMC's public cloud. The Virtustream public cloud is designed for mission-critical applications, such as SAP. EMC acquired Virtustream in 2015 to serve enterprises running a high concentration of applications that don't move easily to the cloud. The Virtustream software typically isn't sold directly to users. It resides in a cloud hosting portal for direct consumption by its end users.
The Virtustream suite also includes the Virtustream Storage Cloud for hyperscale object storage, the Virtustream Federal Cloud for public-sector organizations and the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud electronic medical records archive.
Dell EMC has two object storage clouds
In addition to the Virtustream Storage Cloud, Dell EMC's object storage includes the Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) platform. Dell EMC World featured a preview of ECS.Next software, focusing on advanced analytics, data protection and security. Dell EMC also introduced the ECS Dedicated Cloud Service, which allows customer data to reside as a single tenant in a Virtustream-managed data center.
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Enterprise Hybrid Cloud IaaS to get a Virtustream edition
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) is Dell EMC's turnkey IaaS platform built with VMware software and Dell EMC servers and storage. EHC runs on Dell EMC converged and hyper-converged infrastructure. It is designed to extend local, general-purpose workloads to the cloud, including major public and regional cloud service providers.
Complementing it is the Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud for developing and launching cloud-native applications. Both EHC and the Native Hybrid Cloud are built on VxRail hyper-converged boxes packaged with Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Dell EMC's Goulden said the cloud storage strategy includes plans for a Virtustream edition of EHC to encompass mission-critical workloads that run in the data center. "Today, those applications require dedicated on-premises hardware in a virtualized environment," he said. "They are not running in the cloud at all."
Integrating public cloud storage stacks
Also new is Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack. Windows shops can get the software development kit as part of an on-premises hybrid cloud storage strategy, based on Microsoft Azure. The integrated system, due out later this year, incorporates Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and networking and Pivotal software.
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Rounding out its cloud storage strategy, Dell EMC introduced Cloud Flex pricing for VxRail and XC Series appliances, which involves a 12-month commitment, but no upfront cash.
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Dell EMC cloud storage strategy needs to cut through fog
Garry Kranz, Senior News Writer
There was plenty of discussion at Dell EMC World 2017 about the vendor's cloud storage strategy. Dell EMC President David Goulden urged attendees to envision all their storage as a cloud, regardless of whether it resides in an on-premises array or is shipped off site.
"The first part of our strategy is to support a multicloud world to enable your companies to make the digital transformation. The second part of our strategy concerns the infrastructure the cloud runs on," Goulden said.
But Dell EMC did not provide much clarity on how users should distinguish between its overlapping -- and sometimes redundant -- cloud platforms.
"We are product-oriented today, and that's a weakness," said Sam Grocott, Dell EMC's senior vice president of marketing for storage and data protection. "We have so many ways to tier data [to the cloud] simply, but it can be confusing. We are making it a priority to work on that across storage and data protection."
One way for Dell EMC to remove confusion around its cloud strategy would be to make it more specific.
In this e-guide
Breaking News
Not Just Vendor Convergence
All-Flash with Substance
Head in the Clouds
Dell-Emc integration
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"I would say Dell EMC's cloud storage strategy is a bit foggy. They have some work to do in the area of marketing and communications. They should cut through the buzzword bingo and help customers see opportunity," said Greg Schulz, a senior advisory analyst and founder at consulting firm StorageIO in Stillwater, Minn.
Even people who have embraced the Dell EMC cloud may find the term a distracting buzzword. Ted Newman, head of cloud services for U.K.-based Royal Bank of Scotland, said RBS built an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service framework on top of Dell EMC Vblock storage. But despite his title and job function at RBS, Newman said he prefers the term "IT as a service" to cloud.
"I've been over the term 'cloud' for about five years now," Newman said. "What we wanted to do was take infrastructure out of the equation."
He said RBS uses the term "enterprise cloud platform," which he called "the IT equivalent of 'Bob.' It's a very generic name."
Here is our attempt to shed some light on the Dell EMC clouds.
Virtustream data centers host new cloud
Virtustream is Dell EMC's public cloud. The Virtustream public cloud is designed for mission-critical applications, such as SAP. EMC acquired Virtustream in 2015 to serve enterprises running a high concentration of applications that don't move easily to the cloud. The Virtustream software typically isn't sold directly to users. It resides in a cloud hosting portal for direct consumption by its end users.
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The Virtustream suite also includes the Virtustream Storage Cloud for hyperscale object storage, the Virtustream Federal Cloud for public-sector organizations and the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud electronic medical records archive.
Dell EMC has two object storage clouds
In addition to the Virtustream Storage Cloud, Dell EMC's object storage includes the Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) platform. Dell EMC World featured a preview of ECS.Next software, focusing on advanced analytics, data protection and security. Dell EMC also introduced the ECS Dedicated Cloud Service, which allows customer data to reside as a single tenant in a Virtustream-managed data center.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud IaaS to get a
Virtustream edition
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) is Dell EMC's turnkey IaaS platform built with VMware software and Dell EMC servers and storage. EHC runs on Dell EMC converged and hyper-converged infrastructure. It is designed to extend local, general-purpose workloads to the cloud, including major public and regional cloud service providers.
Complementing it is the Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud for developing and launching cloud-native applications. Both EHC and the Native Hybrid Cloud are built on VxRail hyper-converged boxes packaged with Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
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Dell EMC's Goulden said the cloud storage strategy includes plans for a Virtustream edition of EHC to encompass mission-critical workloads that run in the data center. "Today, those applications require dedicated on-premises hardware in a virtualized environment," he said. "They are not running in the cloud at all."
Integrating public cloud storage stacks
Also new is Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack. Windows shops can get the software development kit as part of an on-premises hybrid cloud storage strategy, based on Microsoft Azure. The integrated system, due out later this year, incorporates Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and networking and Pivotal software.
Rounding out its cloud storage strategy, Dell EMC introduced Cloud Flex pricing for VxRail and XC Series appliances, which involves a 12-month commitment, but no upfront cash.
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Dell EMC World 2017: HCI, startup investments, Nautilus
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
LAS VEGAS -- Notes from Dell EMC World 2017:
The head of Rent-A-Center's data center team gave an in-depth presentation about his company embracing hyper-convergence. Mike Conroy, Rent-A-Center's senior director of technical operations, explained why he purchased Dell EMC VxRail appliances, his selection process, implementation challenges Rent-A-Center faced and where hyper-converged infrastructure works best.
Why hyper-convergence: Rent-A-Center, which grew to a $3 billion annual revenue company largely through acquisition, had a collection of technologies throughout its Plano, Texas, data center. That included "various switches, clashing servers and disparate storage," according to Conroy. "We run every operating system that's been out there probably since 1989," he said.
Conroy said upgrades were a major challenge. Rent-A-Center suffered from administrative overhead, performance problems, and "our staff was spending an inordinate amount of time just keeping the lights on," doing things like patching servers and making sure its storage was compatible with everything else, Conroy said.
Conroy said he wanted to standardize on one set of technology. He began with an overhaul of the organization's Citrix-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
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Why Dell EMC VxRail: Conroy said he spent more than a year researching hyper-converged options, then brought in VxRail and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) systems from Nutanix and SimplilVity for testing. He said there was little difference in performance, as all three tested well. He said there wasn't much difference in pricing, either, with Nutanix on the high side and Simplivity the lowest. The decision came down to integration. Rent-A-Center moved to a VMware Horizon View for VDI, and VxRail had the best overall integration between VMware and its hardware and applications.
"When I upgrade now, there's one button to push, and everything happens," he said.
At the time, Dell and EMC had not yet completed their merger, and SimpliVity had not yet been acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "We dodged that bullet," Conroy said of the HPE-SimpliVity buy.
Conroy said Rent-A-Center bought two VxRail 280F all-flash G Series appliances, "because why would you not buy all-flash today?" Each chassis has four nodes.
HCI benefits: Conley said performance complaints about his company's VDI from users dropped from 30 calls a week to zero since switching to hyper-converged. He went from two full-time IT people on the old system to half a full-time admin position on the VxRail, and he now supports 25,000 users with a system that takes up three-quarters of a rack. "I took 100 pounds of cabling out of the data center ... It's so much cleaner now," Conley said.
The VDI system now gets upgraded and patched quickly, without users even knowing, and HCI also removed hidden costs in pricing.
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"CFOs really like predictable spending," Conley said. He said going back to the CFO for more money after a fairly new storage system hits capacity "is a hard conversation to have."
He said if the current Nutanix-based Dell EMC XC Series were available to him a year ago, it might have "changed the conversation," but he probably would have picked VxRail anyway for its integration with VMware vSAN HCI software.
Biggest challenge: EMC sent three implementation teams before getting the VxRail set up. The first team's engineer needed to open a WebEx session with a supervisor just to figure out how to log on and was quickly dismissed. The second team had VxRail experience, but operated from a closely followed script that couldn't handle all of Rent-A-Center's legacy technologies during setup. The third engineer zipped through the set up in less than four hours.
Lesson: "Make sure you get a good engineer upfront," Conley said.
Expansion plans: Rent-A-Center has expanded to four appliances and eight nodes, and Conley said he expects to go to 32 nodes in the near future. As his NetApp FlexPod converged infrastructure storage systems come off maintenance, he will move other applications to VxRail.
Still, he said hyper-convergence isn't right for all applications. He doesn't recommend using it for databases that require inconsistent and high disk I/O. "I wouldn't put [Microsoft] Exchange on it," he said. "If you have a high-volume SQL database, it's probably not a good fit."
He said the HCI appliances he tested could handle those types of applications alone, but those databases would take resources from other applications in the same cluster.
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Dell opens the books on venture
investments
Dell Technologies Capital (DTC) was formally introduced at Dell EMC World 2017, although the group is a combination of the Dell and EMC investment arms that have been around for years. Between the Dell and EMC groups, DTC has invested in approximately 80 startups and invests about $100 million a year.
Scott Darling, president of Dell Technologies Capital, said DTC's strategy is to invest in companies in early rounds and become technology partners with those startups. This can keep Dell ahead of the curve on new technologies, including those it does not develop internally, he said.
"It's not necessarily because we're going to acquire these companies," Darling said. "If you invest early, you drive market change instead of having market change drive you. It's an imperative today to do this."
Darling said close to 30 DTC investments have made "exits," which is investor-speak for becoming a public company or getting acquired. Early investors include Dell hyper-converged OEM partner Nutanix -- now a public company -- and all-flash pioneer XtremIO, which EMC acquired.
By coming out of stealth this week, DTC disclosed its portfolio of investments. On the storage side, the list includes Diablo Technologies, Druva, Elastifile, Formation Data Systems, Iguazio, Nasuni, Nexenta and Primary Data. That list reflects Dell EMC's focus on cloud -- Elastifile, Iguazio and Nasuni; software-defined -- Formation, Nexenta and Primary Data; and flash and memory storage -- Diablo.
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Project Nautilus comes up for air at Dell
EMC World 2017
Dell EMC unveiled Project Nautilus analytics software at Dell EMC World 2017. Nautilus is the code name for the still-in-development open source application the vendor describes as a "software-defined solution for storing and analyzing high volumes of streaming IoT [internet of things] data, enabling businesses to make real-time decisions."
Manuvir Das, general manager of Dell EMC's unstructured data group, said Nautilus software will store and analyze real-time stream data off a variety of devices. Nautilus will use Isilon scale-out NAS and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) object storage as repositories. "This will turbocharge Isilon and ECS," Das said.
Cloud-to-cloud still in Dell EMC's plans
Dell EMC is not getting out of the cloud-to-cloud backup business, despite selling off Spanning Cloud Apps last month. Matt Waxman, vice president of product management for Dell EMC's data protection group, said the vendor will continue to sell Spanning software and support its approximately 7,000 customers. But he said cloud-to-cloud backup will show up in other Dell EMC backup products.
"We will continue cloud-to-cloud backup, not just in terms of Spanning, but in other thing that we do," Waxman said.
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New Dell EMC PowerEdge serves up storage expansion
Garry Kranz, Senior News Writer
Storage has made big news at Dell EMC World 2017, but this year's event also encompasses Dell's historical focus on servers and networking.
During a keynote address, Dell EMC executives laid out the vision for the combined company, focused on getting customers to view data storage broadly as a set of interconnected cloud technologies. Reflecting Dell's history in servers and networking, the vendor previewed the 14th generation of Dell EMC PowerEdge storage servers and an accompanying family of 25 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) open networking storage switches for in-rack connectivity.
Several Dell EMC storage products in the pipeline revolve around the souped-up PowerEdge 14G server family, although company executives provided few details on the forthcoming models. General availability will depend on the release of Intel's new Skylake processors, which could come as soon as this summer.
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, opened his keynote with assurances that the newly merged vendor would be able to rationalize the integration of overlapping cloud, networking, servers and storage products.
"We don't believe that one size fits all. And we want to be No. 1 in every product category," Dell said.
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He also told the audience that, despite buying the world's largest storage vendor for $63 billion, servers and PCs remain central to its identity.
"This new generation of PowerEdge server is built to be the bedrock of the new data center. It's the first server designed for the new era [of] all-flash, cloud-enabled, software-defined, scalable and trusted," Dell said, reciting a catalog of Dell EMC product rollouts this week that include refreshed all-flash storage and an integrated Data Domain hardware appliance.
Expanded Ready Node options built on
PowerEdge
The next- generation Dell EMC PowerEdge servers will accommodate approximately 20% more NVM Express (NVMe) flash capacity than existing PowerEdge machines, providing a performance boost that will help storage systems.
Dell EMC President David Goulden said PowerEdge features a secure integrated design that includes the configurable Intel Boot Block to prevent malware takeover. Software intelligence can identify and automatically resolve hardware issues. A single Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd supports 64 virtual desktop users per board, about twice the number of the 13G R730. The difference is the addition of a third NVIDIA graphics processing unit.
"Our new 14G servers will be built into the full Dell EMC product portfolio, bringing our server innovations to storage and data protection as well," Goulden said.
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After the new PowerEdge launches, customers can run it as a validated platform to support Dell EMC VMware VSAN Ready Nodes and ScaleIO Ready Nodes server and block storage bundles. A Ready Node configuration for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct also was introduced for Windows Server 2016 shops. It will be used as the hardware platform for Dell EMC's VxRail and XC hyper-converged systems.
IsilonSD Edge is a virtual NAS the vendor brought out in 2015 based on its scale-out NAS product line. IsilonSD Edge has been enhanced to allow customers to deploy the software on a single PowerEdge 14G node. The revamped IsilonSD Edge integrates VMware vSphere 6.5 and can be deployed as virtual storage with ScaleIO and VSAN.
Next: Dell EMC PowerEdge boosts software-
defined storage
ScaleIO.Next, Dell EMC's upgraded software-defined block storage system, gains inline compression, enhanced snapshots, granular thin provisioning and enhanced volume migration. Dell EMC claims customers will realize performance and latency gains by running the new ScaleIO storage on 14G servers outfitted with NVMe drives.
The vendor's upgraded Elastic Cloud Storage object storage, ECS.Next, adds data analytics and more enterprise-grade data protection. Customers can use the new ECS Dedicated Cloud to run their hybrid storage as a single tenant hosted in a Virtustream data center.
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A new software-defined storage for ECS nodes or Isilon scale-out NAS is also in the works. Code-named "Project Nautilus," it is geared to support high-volume data streaming from internet-of-things devices to Dell EMC storage.
Dell EMC World attendees also received a look at the vendor's expanded line of Open Networking GbE switches rolled out earlier this year. The top-of-rack S5100-ON switch matches the 25 GbE support native on the Dell EMC PowerEdge 14G, with fabric uplinks for a 100 GbE spine to accelerate traffic between racks. Each QSFP28 optical port can support 10 GbE, 25 GbE, 40 GbE, 50 GbE and 100 GbE.
S4100-ON is 10/100 GbE in-rack switch billed as a unified multiprotocol device that can support converged LAN and SAN environments at 32 Gbps Fibre Channel. The S5100-ON and S4100-ON ship with Dell's new programmable Linux-based OS10 Enterprise Edition operating system.
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Upgraded Nexsan Unity unified arrays get jolt of flash
Garry Kranz, Senior News Writer
As Dell EMC showed off new Unity midrange arrays amid a flurry of all-flash storage rollouts this week, the other vendor with the Unity brand -- and the trademark owner -- made its own news.
Nexsan Inc., which recently beat Dell EMC in a trademark lawsuit, today trotted out Nexsan Unity 2.0, with reconfigured hardware and expanded cloud-based file sharing. Upgrades to the multiprotocol NAS and SAN array include heavier doses of flash, twice as much RAM and throughput gains with Intel Broadwell version 4 CPUs.
Most notably, Nexsan eliminated the need to run its E-Series arrays as Unity back-end storage, replacing it with JBODs combined with RAID inside the box. Nexsan has made flash modules available across Unity arrays in 1.92 TB, 3.84 TB and 7.68 TB capacities.
Nexsan's FASTier provides RAM and flash caching. FASTier SSDs originally were in the head unit, but the latest version places the flash directly on the 12 Gbps SAS storage shelves.
Unity 2.0 accelerates reads and frees up drive slots for expanding flash capacity, said Gary Watson, Nexsan’s co-founder and vice president of technical engagement. It also ensures every customer gets flash storage.
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"We had resisted doing that before, but the newer processors have enough cores and memory bandwidth to handle hundreds of drives and not hurt I/O performance," Watson said.
Other hardware changes in Nexsan Unity include moving to DDR4 dual inline memory modules to increase DRAM. It integrates the User Datagram Protocol with caching and compression built into the stack to optimize LAN-based packet transfer.
Nexsan added support for SMB 3 and changed its user interface to default to HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash.
"They've gotten rid of the all-disk shelves. That first little bit of flash gets you a lot of performance advantage. You could put the very hot data on the flash and get good bang for the buck," said Howard Marks, chief scientist at IT analyst firm DeepStorage.
An entry-level Nexsan Unity 2000 tops out at 168 TB of raw storage with two storage chassis. Customers get more than 2 PB with the Unity 4000 midrange appliance. The high-end Unity 6000 scales to 5 PB.
New flash configurations are the Unity models, 2200, 4400 or 6900, configured with SAS SSDs in 1.92 TB, 3.84 TB, or 7.68 TB capacities. The maximum configuration supports 216 drives, with a raw capacity of 1.69 PB.
File sharing is secure caring
Users can securely share file folders with Enterprise n-Way Sync cloud software. It supports mobile, web and desktop access, with support for Android
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and iOS. Enterprise n-Way Sync is Nexsan's branding for the Transporter technology Nexsan acquired when its parent company, Imation, bought Connected Data. Current Nexsan COO Geoff Barrall was Connected Data's founder.
Imation reorganized after spinning out Nexsan as a private company earlier this year to hedge fund Spear Point Capital Management LLC.
Nexsan Unity arrays package the NST operating-system software on a branded x86 chassis. Unified storage support encompasses standard block and file storage protocols. Unity arrays include a software-transparent link to a federated object store with the Nexsan Assureon secure archive. Array capacities remain the same as previous Unity arrays.
Customers can complement Unity with the optional Nexsan Unity Active Archive Appliance for unstructured compliance data. Data ingested in Unity primary storage is instantly replicated to the local Active Archive filer. The goal is to ensure two copies of a file or object are continuously available.
The vendor said it achieved a milestone in April with 100 Unity systems deployed.
Despite Nexsan's victory in a court case over the Unity name in a Massachusetts federal district court last month, Dell EMC has kept the Unity name for its midrange arrays for now.
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Dell EMC World 2017: XC, VxRail sold in coopetition
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
LAS VEGAS -- Dell EMC is pushing ahead with its competing hyper-converged platforms, upgrading its homegrown VxRail Appliance, as well as the XC Series it sells in partnership with Nutanix.
While the XC Series was not born to Dell EMC, the vendor is treating it as one of the family. Dell EMC World 2017 featured a series of enhancements to its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platforms, and the XC Series received feature parity with the homegrown VxRail Appliance.
While that's good news for Nutanix, Dell EMC customers may wonder why the vendor has two competing products. Dell EMC executives said the answer is in the hypervisor. VxRail incorporates Dell EMC's VMware vSAN software and is used with VMware hypervisors. The XC Series uses an HCI software stack from Nutanix through an OEM deal signed by Dell before the EMC acquisition. Dell EMC aims XC at organizations running non-VMware hypervisors. The XC Series supports Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as Nutanix's KVM-based Acropolis hypervisor.
Both VxRail and XC will ship on 14th-generation (14G) Dell EMC PowerEdge servers beginning in September, with configurations starting at $25,000 and a new cloudlike pricing model. Dell EMC is adding support for its Avamar Virtual Edition, Data Domain and Data Domain Virtual Edition data protection software to XC, matching support already available on VxRail Appliances. XC is also
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available in a reference architecture with Dell EMC's Pivotal Cloud Foundry, just as VxRail is.
"And that's just the beginning," said Alan Atkinson, Dell EMC's general manager of the XC Series. "You'll see us incorporate more of our IP [intellectual property] into XC."
Dell EMC World 2017: Expanded HCI options
When Dell disclosed plans to acquire EMC, many in the industry wondered what that would mean for the Dell-Nutanix partnership. The thinking was that Dell EMC would not want to sell an HCI system that competes with vSAN and VxRail. But months after the merger closed last fall, the combined vendor said it would stick by its Nutanix-based HCI and EMC's long-standing partnership to sell Cisco servers and networking that compete with Dell products.
Atkinson and Gil Shneorson, general manager for VxRail, said there is no contention between the products' groups or sales teams. The sales strategy is defined by the potential customer's hypervisor plans.
"First of all, it's the same sales team," Atkinson said. "We [Dell EMC] just want to be the default choice for hyper-convergence. It's absolutely eating traditional compute, and it's absolutely eating traditional storage."
VxRail 4.5 will be available as a software upgrade with vSAN 6.6 for existing customers on current PowerEdge servers in June, and it will ship on 14G PowerEdge boxes when they launch later this year.
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The $25,000 starting price is for a three-node cluster, with 480 GB of solid-state drive capacity ad 6 TB of hard disk drive capacity per node. That is available for XC and VxRail.
The vendor also introduced Cloud Flex pricing for HCI at Dell EMC World 2017, allowing customers to purchase VxRail or XC appliances with no upfront cost. They make monthly payments and can return the equipment after 12 months. After a year, payments decline by 30% annually.
Cloud-style pricing is likely to become a big part of HCI pricing throughout the industry, as vendors push hyper-convergence as an enterprise cloud building block. Nutanix implemented cloudlike pricing this month, with a six-month minimum commitment.
"VxRail is effectively a cloud in a box, now with no money down," said Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, during his Dell EMC World 2017 keynote Monday.
Who's No. 1 in hyper-converged?
Dell EMC would seem to have motivation to curtail XC sales in favor of VxRail. Its margins are better with VxRail because it uses all Dell EMC technology. Also, the vendor is trying to supplant Nutanix as the HCI market leader.
Dell EMC CMO Jeremy Burton said Monday at Dell EMC World 2017 that the vendor is already No. 1 in hyper-converged, although IDC shows Nutanix as the leader. Atkinson said Dell EMC counts all VxRail, XC Series and most of what IDC puts in the "others" category, because the "others" usually include vSAN software that customers use to build their own HCI.
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Shneorson said HCI is rapidly gaining in popularity, as customers want to converge their storage, compute and virtualization in a single box.
"It's becoming mainstream, and it's happening a lot faster than I thought it would," he said.
Shneorson said the one big impediment to buying hyper-converged is when customers have misaligned refresh cycles. If they recently purchased storage or compute and are now looking to refresh the other part, they are not likely to buy hyper-converged.
But that's not the only reason for sticking with traditional SANs. Ted Newman, head of cloud services for Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), said he considered HCI, but decided it did not fit his infrastructure because he has mainframe servers and tens of thousands of virtual machines. RBS runs Dell EMC Vblock converged infrastructure arrays in its data centers to support platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service applications. But Newman said HCI could be in his future.
"I considered hyper-converged, but not for our scale," Newman said. "Our first step was to consolidate and standardize from a lot of different platforms. Next, we could diversify on VxRail or VxRack. Now that we've gotten our people used to a buy rather than build model, it may be easier to get them onto hyper-converged."
Matthew Brisse, research vice president for data center storage at Gartner, said HCI is becoming a good fit for modern data centers.
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"The next-generation data center won't be the center for your data," he said. "It's becoming a center of control. It's not the traditional data center that we've seen since the 1990s. We're seeing a lot of cases where a SAN won't cut it."
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Dell EMC all-flash moves focus on VMAX, XtremIO and Isilon
Garry Kranz, Senior News Writer
Day 1 of Dell EMC World 2017 turned into a flash fest.
Amid pomp and circumstance -- and an estimated 13,500 attendees -- Dell EMC World 2017 kicked off Monday with capacity and performance upgrades to three all-flash storage platforms. New Dell EMC all-flash models include faster, denser versions of VMAX and XtremIO SAN arrays and a redesigned Isilon scale-out NAS.
The newly merged storage vendor also said it would keep the Dell EMC Unity branding for its midrange flash and hybrid arrays, despite losing a recent trademarking battle in court. Dell EMC unveiled three new Unity models at its annual user conference, despite a federal court ruling last month that awarded trademark priority for Unity to rival storage vendor Nexsan.
"We're doing an end-to-end all-flash refresh," said Sam Grocott, senior vice president of marketing for storage and data protection at Dell EMC.
Dell EMC also upgraded its SC -- formerly Compellent -- platform, launching an SC5020 hybrid block array to replace the entry-level SC4020.
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New all-flash VMAX flagship sails into view
VMAX is Dell EMC's flagship array family. The all-flash VMAX 950F replaces the VMAX 850F as the highest-density model. It has the same rack density as the 850F -- a 9U form factor with 240 drive bays -- but provides four times the raw flash capacity with 15.3 TB solid-state drives. VMAX 850F accepted 3.84 TB SSDs.
A fully populated VMAX 950F could provide approximately 3.7 PB per rack. The Dell EMC all-flash VMAX provides workload consolidation for block, file, open and mainframe storage.
VMAX 950F embeds an Intel Broadwell chipset to juice performance for latency-sensitive applications. Throughput is rated at 6.7 million IOPS, which Dell EMC claims is nearly 70% higher than its previous generation.
Data protection enhancements for the VMAX 950F include secure snapshots with policy-based retention periods. It lets customers tune their snapshots to meet compliance requirements. The VMAX 950 integrates Dell EMC ProtectPoint backup and recovery software and continuous data protection with RecoverPoint.
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Scale-out XtremIO X2 adds scale-up
capability
XtremIO X2 is the second generation of Dell EMC's only storage platform that has no models with any hard disk drives. Its predominant use case is virtual desktop infrastructure. EMC picked up all-flash startup XtremIO in 2012 and launched branded arrays on the technology in 2013. XtremIO arrays use X-Bricks that contain SSDs.
X2 packs more X-Bricks in a small footprint. Existing models support 25 SSDs in 6U. XtremIO X2 can fit 72 1.9 TB SSDs in a 4U chassis, or roughly 137 TB. A single chassis can cluster eight X-Bricks for more than 1 PB of storage.
"XtremIO has always been known for its scale-out capabilities. Add another brick, and you can scale out compute, density and capacity linearly," Grocott said. "But now, we let you scale up the density of a single X-Brick by adding more drives to it."
Missing from XtremIO X2 is the scale-out Dell Fluid File System (FluidFS). Dell acquired FluidFS from Exanet in 2010 and added the file capabilities to Compellent and EqualLogic SAN arrays. Last year, Dell EMC said it would integrate FluidFS in XtremIO, and product development teams were already collaborating on it. However, that plan has been shelved.
"We're not going to pursue that at all," Grocott said. "Not today, not tomorrow. It came down to the fact that we don't need another file system to go after XtremIO use cases. We have Isilon, Unity and others in the portfolio, so we
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decided to keep XtremIO laser-focused on use cases in the all-flash block segment."
Dell EMC Isilon NAS grows to Infinity
The updated all-flash Isilon NAS filer is built with Dell EMC Infinity architecture. It builds on the theme of concentrating dense flash in less space. Infinity is a modular design that embeds four bladed compute nodes and 60 SSDs in a 4U chassis. Up to now, an Isilon deployment required four dedicated 4U nodes, topping out at 35 drives in 16U.
A single Isilon Infinity chassis scales to 924 TB with 15 TB SSDs. Customers could cluster up to 36 Infinity chassis -- 144 nodes -- and get 33 PB within a single-volume file system. Future Isilon disk-based archiving and hybrid NAS models will be based on Infinity.
Scott Sinclair, a storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass., said Dell EMC all-flash products -- VMAX and Isilon -- address a market sweet spot to blend performance and scalability. He said one in five data centers is running out of physical space and seeking all-flash storage that fits its budget.
"CIO and IT administrators we've talked to are running out of everything: capacity, performance, physical space," Sinclair said. "Deploying new storage frames isn't free. Something like VMAX 950 lets them get more out of a single deployment. The ability to consolidate and provide greater capacity and performance in the same package has tremendous benefits.
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"The benefit isn't that application A runs faster, although it will," he explained. "The benefit is that [one] infrastructure now allows me to consolidate applications A, B, C, D and E."
Entry-level, midrange flash gains attention
The Dell EMC Unity product line expanded with four new all-flash arrays: the Unity 350F, 450F, 550F and 650F. Initial Dell EMC Unity arrays came in a 2U, 25-drive form factor. The latest 3U Unity rack takes 80 SSDs and scales to 500 TB of usable storage. Maximum file-system size increases from 36 TB to 256 TB.
Native storage services on the Dell EMC all-flash Unity include inline file compression, integrated copy data management software with snapshot mobility, mapped RAID protection and external encryption key management with the Key Management Interoperability Protocol.
Dell EMC said it had no plans to cease using the Unity brand, even after a Massachusetts court order gave Nexsan trademark priority based on the timing of its filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
"The court's ruling addresses only a single issue in the case. It does not cast doubt on Dell EMC's rights to the product name Dell EMC Unity," Dell EMC said in a prepared statement.
Nexsan declined to comment on Dell EMC's decision to keep its Unity brand. An update to the Nexsan Unity multiprotocol array is expected this week.
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The SC5020 hybrid system is a 3U array with 30 internal drive bays and up to 2 PB of storage, up from 1 PB in the SC4020. Dell was the first vendor to ship storage arrays with triple-level cell SSDs with its SC Series. SC5020 features dual controllers and Fibre Channel, iSCSI and direct-attached SAS connectivity.
This marks the second Dell EMC World user conference since the vendors finalized a $60 billion merger last year. The first combined event in October 2016 was the swan song for Dell World, which is being discontinued. The May Dell EMC World is a continuation of the annual user conference EMC has held since 2001.
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Dell EMC IDPA changes vendor's backup strategy
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
LAS VEGAS -- Dell EMC launched its first enterprise integrated backup appliance today at Dell EMC World 2017, packaging its data protection software with commodity hardware.
The Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) marks a departure in EMC's enterprise data protection strategy. Instead of only selling backup software separate from its Data Domain backup targets, it will sell IDPA as a turnkey appliance with software bundled.
Data Domain's inline deduplication is a key piece of the Dell EMC IDPA, providing the data reduction to go with Dell EMC NetWorker and Avamar backup software.
Dell EMC IDPA: Four hardware options,
single software bundle
The software package is the same on all Dell EMC IDPA turnkey appliances. There are four appliance models -- the DP5300, DP5800, DP8300 and DP8800 -- ranging from 34 TB to 1 PB of usable capacity. The appliances are Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.
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"It's a one-stop shop for software," said Sam Grocott, senior vice president of marketing for storage and data protection at Dell EMC. "The only decision is the capacity points."
The DP5300 appliance scales to 130 TB of usable capacity, and it's rated for a maximum throughput of 24 TB per hour using Data Domain (DD) Boost software. The DP5800 stores up to 288 TB of usable capacity, with a throughput of up to 31 TB per hour with DD Boost. The DP8300 stores up to 780 TB of usable capacity, with a maximum throughput of 41 TB per hour with DD Boost. The DP8800 stores up to 1 PB of usable capacity, with a maximum throughput of 68 TB per hour.
The DP5300 and DP5800 are midsize enterprise models, while the DP8300 and DP8800 are for large enterprises.
Dell EMC claims an average 55-to-1 deduplication rate for the IDPA platform. Other built-in features include native cloud tiering, encryption and data analytics.
The EMC Data Domain platform has long been a favorite backup target not only for EMC NetWorker and Avamar software, but for other vendors' backup applications. Data Domain has dominated the backup target market for years, but it has lost ground to Veritas NetBackup integrated appliances over the past year.
Integrated data backup appliances remove the need for media servers and the need to buy backup software separate from the hardware. They are also simpler to set up and manage, although they may not scale as well as stand-alone disk backup targets.
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The concept is hardly new. Veritas -- then Symantec -- launched its first integrated appliances in 2010. Other traditional backup vendors, such as Arcserve and Unitrends, have since adopted integrated appliances, and well-funded startups Cohesity and Rubrik have launched what they call converged secondary data platforms over the past two years.
EMC's first departure from its long-standing Data Domain backup strategy came in April 2016, when it launched a Data Domain Virtual Edition. DD VE separated the data deduplication software from the hardware and will be part of the Dell EMC IDPA.
Last summer, EMC brought out a VCE Data Protection appliance for entry-level and midrange customers that scaled from 21 TB to 288 TB and only included Avamar and Data Domain software.
Unlike traditional Data Domain appliances, the Dell EMC IDPA requires customers to use Dell EMC backup software, as well as its hardware.
Data Domain still important to Dell EMC data
protection
Jason Buffington, a principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass., who focuses on data protection, said Data Domain remains a key piece of Dell EMC's data protection strategy. He called it the "secret sauce" in the IDPA, and he said a place remains for stand-alone Data Domain appliances for customers using non-Dell EMC backup software.
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"I would make the case that the secret sauce in the Data Domain dedupe architecture still trumps what most folks do in software-based dedupe," he said. "But it's not uncommon for someone to have Veeam or Oracle RMAN or other backup software running, and they still can use Data Domain as their centralized storage."
Buffington pointed out that the Dell EMC IDPA scales into petabytes of logical data with dedupe, which makes it scalable enough for enterprises.
"The customers I talk to like the idea of an integrated appliance, the idea of a data mover, software and repository all part of the same system," he said. "But almost everyone I talked to said, 'We love them until we max them out.' If the turnkey appliance vendors made bigger appliances, you can scale higher."
Dell EMC also launched DD VE 3.1, which now enables backup of workloads in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Organizations using DD VE and Dell EMC Data Protection Suite will be able to restore virtual machine images from within Amazon Web Services for disaster recovery.
The Dell EMC IDPA is scheduled for general availability over the summer.
Can Dell EMC count on IDPA to reverse
share slip?
EMC has long been the dominant backup appliance vendor, according to IDC, powered by Data Domain sales. However, its dominance slipped in 2016.
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Dell EMC's backup appliance revenue for the fourth quarter of 2016 dropped 18.6% from the previous year, while No. 2 Veritas increased 31%. The overall market dipped 4.1% in the fourth quarter. Dell EMC's market share dipped from 69.6% in the fourth quarter of 2015 to 59.1% in the same quarter in 2016, while Veritas improved from 12.1% to 16.5%.
For the full year, Dell EMC revenue slipped from $2.1 billion in 2015 to $1.97 billion in 2016, while the overall market increased 2.5%. Dell EMC's market share went from 61.4% in 2015 to 59% for 2016. Meanwhile, No. 2 Veritas increased from $479 million in 2015 to $530 million in 2016, and its market share increased from 14.3% to 15.8%.
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Dell EMC World 2017: Flash, HCI and cloud take center stage
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
If you think Dell EMC will condense any of its overlapping storage products at Dell EMC World 2017, think again.
There has been a great amount of speculation about which storage arrays might be dropped since Dell said it would pay more than $60 billion to acquire EMC in late 2015. The merger created overlap throughout Dell EMC's combined traditional storage products, especially in midrange arrays.
Michael Dell spent a lot of time in the run-up to closing the deal assuring Dell's Compellent customers their platform would survive the merger. That will remain true through next week, when the vendor makes a crush of product releases at Dell EMC World 2017, which begins May 8.
Dell EMC is looking to pivot toward newer technologies such as flash, hyper-converged and cloud as sales of traditional disk-based arrays slip. Even with all this change, Dell EMC will hold on to its major array platforms. The traditional array families such as EMC VMAX, Unity and Dell SC (formerly Compellent) will survive but are considerably flashier. In many cases, they are flash-only, as is Dell EMC XtremIO, which has never been a hard disk drive system.
During an analyst day last month, Dell EMC president David Goulden said the vendor will eventually merge midrange arrays but will proceed at a slow pace. For now, the Unity platform from EMC and Compellent SC platform from Dell will continue.
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"There will be a combined midrange family, but we don't have to rush into that because we have two very important families," Goulden said of the Unity and SC platforms. "We have been making moves to pull the storage portfolio together."
The vendor will instead focus on integrating flash throughout its storage lines at Dell EMC World 2017 and beyond. Its recent decision to discontinue its DSSD high-end NVM Express-based shared storage box was a step in that direction. Instead of selling a DSSD product that appealed to a limited customer base, Dell EMC will incorporate that technology into other products.
"We're making that a feature of storage products rather than its own thing," Goulden said at analyst day. "We're focusing high-end storage products according to where their respective strengths are, as opposed to a broad overlap.
"You'll see us announce a lot of new storage capabilities at Dell EMC World," Goulden continued. "We recognize the storage market is in consolidation mode and the market is basically flat, but there are some great pockets of growth. There are a lot of things happening in the storage business. We're seeing hypergrowth in all-flash, we're seeing hypergrowth in converged infrastructure and we're seeing declines in traditional markets."
Dell EMC has the technology pieces for this changing world. It has more all-flash array platforms than any of its competitors. Its Vblock converged infrastructure (CI) partnership with Cisco still is the market leader in CI revenue, although the emphasis may shift to using Dell servers instead of Cisco in converged packages. Dell sells VMware vSAN software that powers hyper-convergence and Dell EMC VxRail vSAN-based hyper-converged appliances. It also has a raft of cloud technologies.
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Dell World 2017 focuses on changing world
But changing from a traditional data storage vendor to a modern one can be difficult for a company the size of the new Dell EMC parent company, Dell Technologies. Arun Taneja, president and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group, said Dell EMC is unlikely to find smooth sailing through its transition.
"It won't be pain-free for them," Taneja said. "These intermediate periods can be disruptive."
Taneja said declines in traditional storage revenue experienced by all major vendors show the need to switch to newer technologies. But the new products based on software and commodity hardware bring lower margins than legacy storage arrays. That will help buyers more than sellers.
"New technologies are not making up for the shortfall, and the shortfall is dramatic," Taneja said. "Traditional storage sales are dropping like a rock, and these other new technologies are clearly the future. But they're way more cost-effective (for buyers). You can't do gouging with these technologies. If it's software-defined, people buy their own hardware. Even if you sell them the hardware, it's standard hardware. VMAX and VNX arrays used to be proprietary hardware. You could charge whatever you wanted to charge. Now, you have a 1U or 2U Dell server node, (and) everybody knows what that's worth. You can't charge nine times the cost for that."
Dell EMC's Goulden pointed out that traditional storage systems make up about two-thirds of storage revenue today, but the equation is shifting rapidly to the newer technologies.
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"Our world and the customer's world are changing drastically ... that's changed forever," he said.
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All-flash VSAN gaining speed
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
LAS VEGAS -- VMware is banking on flash and future advances in security and analytics to push its Virtual SAN hyper-converged software deep into the enterprise.
VSAN became more flash-friendly with version 6.2 earlier this year, with data deduplication enabling customers to gain more usable capacity from their expensive flash media. That has prompted customers to use all-flash VSAN nodes for applications that demand significant performance.
At VMworld this week, Lee Caswell, VMware's vice president of storage and availability products, called VSAN "the fastest-growing product in the fastest-growing market in storage." He said VSAN is lining up 100 customers per week -- triple its growth rate from last year -- and now has 5,000 customers.
Caswell said, with flash and hyper-converged, VSAN is bringing "the two biggest disrupters in the market together."
It helps that storage and server vendors, such as VMware's parent company EMC and EMC's new parent Dell Technologies, sell hyper-converged systems running VSAN. EMC representatives said its VSAN-powered VxRail has beaten internal sales forecasts since its February launch. Dell is among the partners who sell all-flash VSAN on Ready Node prepackaged hardware.
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But VMware claims 500,000 overall customers, which means VSAN has only a 1% penetration rate of its customer base. Hyper-converged competition is heating up, with mature hyper-converged companies, such as Nutanix and SimpliVity, now supporting alternative hypervisors along with VMware. They also support all-flash hyper-converged appliances.
As hyper-convergence moves beyond virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and remote office deployments, all-flash VSAN may not be enough for VMware to catch market leader Nutanix. VMware also seeks to add management features to make its case.
"Management is the No. 1 issue that we can improve," Caswell admitted during a VMworld session this week.
Caswell said hyper-converged is not the right choice for companies that have hundreds of servers and those who need the lowest latency, such as stock-trading firms. "The target design for VSAN is not the highest possible performance," he said.
But he said he sees it as a good fit for most mixed workloads, and he said most VSAN customers say they use it to run business-critical applications.
Of seven companies involved with two VSAN user panels on the first two days of VMworld, five were already using all-flash clusters, running them in the lab or evaluating them. Most of those all-flash VSAN implementations were on Ready Nodes.
"We're going to do all-flash from now on," said Adam Cook, a senior systems engineer at Amway, based in Ada, Mich., who began using all-flash for VDI. "Our private cloud will be all-flash."
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Cook said the cost of flash was an initial concern, but deduplication reduced it to just over $1 per gigabyte on Supermicro servers, and that includes the cost of software and networking.
Michael Caruso, assistant vice president of corporate information systems for Synergent Corp., based in Westbrook, Maine, said he is switching his Horizon View VDI clusters from hybrids to all-flash. He said his hybrids "seem to be holding their own" with 310 virtual desktops, but users always want more performance.
"My end users are always complaining about performance and speed. I'm not messing around; I'll just give them all-flash," he said. "Hopefully, it will give them a better experience."
Unlike the past two VMworld conferences, VMware had no new VSAN product releases this year. However, the company is including VSAN in its new Cloud Foundation, which received a lot of attention at the conference. VMware executives also previewed roadmap features that will appear in a coming VSAN beta release and versions beyond that.
Christos Karamanolis, CTO of VMware's storage and availability group, said the next beta will add native encryption of data at rest as part of the design goal to increase enterprise features. A longer-term project is to provide cloud-based analytics that have been showing up in storage arrays over the past few years.
"We'll collect data through telemetry and crunch the numbers in the VMware public cloud," Karamanolis said.
A goal of the analytics is to help customers predict problems and suggest actions to alleviate them. For instance, if usage patterns detect a demand surge
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on a cluster, the analytics engine can recommend moving a workload to an all-flash cluster or off to a public cloud.
VMware would use the data collected from thousands of customers to do root-cause analysis and send information back to customers through the vSphere interface. Karamanolis said VMware is also working on adding data governance to VSAN, enabling administrators to control "what data is where, who has control of it and how it is accessed."
VMware is also planning integrated support for containers and its Photon Platform for cloud-native applications in VSAN.
During a hyper-converged technology session, Karamanolis discussed how VSAN will also benefit from future flash advances, such as NVMe and then 3D XPoint. "All-flash is becoming the predominant configuration," he said. "This is the model going forward."
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Dell EMC VxRail hitches ride on Enterprise Hybrid Cloud
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
Dell EMC's VxRail turned one today, and the vendor marked the anniversary by adding the hyper-converged platform to its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud package.
Dell EMC claims over 1,000 customers for VxRail through the end of 2016, with more than 8,000 nodes, 100,000 CPU cores and 65 PB of storage capacity shipped in the system. VxRail is EMC's first successful hyper-converged appliance, following a short, failed attempt with a Vspex Blue product launched in 2015.
Like Vspex Blue, VxRail is based on Dell-owned VMware's vSAN hyper-converged software. It also runs on Dell PowerEdge servers, although VxRail originally incorporated Quanta servers until the Dell-EMC acquisition closed last September. VxRail launched just after VMware upgraded vSAN to version 6.2, which added data reduction and other capabilities that improved its performance with flash storage. Dell EMC VxRail senior vice president Gil Shneorson said 60% of VxRail sales have been on all-flash appliances.
"We're definitely seeing the combination of hyper-converged and all-flash taking off in a meaningful way," he said.
Now VxRail is an option for Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) customers. EHC is a set of applications and services running on Dell EMC hardware that provide automation, orchestration and self-service features. The
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software includes VMware vRealize cloud management, ViPR Controller and PowerPath/VE storage management, and EMC Storage Analytics.
Other EHC storage options include EMC VMAX, XtremIO, Unity, ScaleIO and Isilon arrays sold as VxBlock reference architectures with Dell PowerEdge servers. EHC is also available with VxRack Flex hyper-converged systems that use Dell EMC ScaleIO software instead of VxRail appliances. Data protection options include Avamar, RecoverPoint and Vplex software and Data Domain backup hardware.
Along with the Dell EMC VxRail option, the vendor is adding subscription support and encryption as a service to EHC. Dell EMC does not break out EHC financials, but Dell EMC senior vice president of hybrid cloud platforms Peter Cutts said its revenue was in the "hundreds of millions of dollars" last year.
Adding a Dell EMC VxRail options lets EHC customers start with as few as 200 virtual machines.
"This gives customers the ability to start smaller, configure EHC as an appliance and go forward in that direction," Cutts said.
For now, organizations who want to use VxRail with EHC need to buy a new appliance. Cutts said the vendor is working on allowing customers to convert existing VxRail appliances to EHC but that is not yet an option.
Using VxRail as part of EHC makes sense as vendors begin to position hyper-converged systems as enterprise cloud building blocks. Hyper-converged market leader Nutanix now positions its appliances that way, emphasizing its software stack's ability to move data from any application, hypervisor or cloud to any other application, hypervisor or cloud. Nutanix is VxRail's chief competitor.
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"We've seen requests for more data center-type features and functionality," Shneorson said. "VxRail is being put into data centers in much larger clusters than we originally anticipated. We're seeing a shift from an initial focus on remote offices and test/dev to mission critical data center use."
But unlike Nutanix, Dell EMC still also sells traditional storage. So Shneorson admits hyper-converged is not a universal answer because not every organization wants to scale their storage and compute in lockstep.
"It's a matter of economics," he said. "The advantage of hyper-converged is you can start small and grow in small increments. But some customers' environments are already large and predictable in growth. By using shared storage you can get any ratio of CPU to disk. With hyper-converged, there is always a set ratio of CPU to disk. If you want massive amounts of storage with a small amount of CPUs for example, you would be better served by a traditional architecture."
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VMware vSAN 6.6 adds encryption, analytics, 'nothing shocking'
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
VMware added software-based encryption and cloud analytics to its vSAN hyper-converged software in the first vSAN release not tied to a major vSphere platform rollout.
VMware vSAN 6.6, which launched Tuesday, includes data at-rest encryption that works on any hardware certified to run the software. Customers of earlier vSAN versions required self-encrypted hard drives for encryption. VMware claims the software encryption works with all Key Management Interoperability Protocol-compliant key managers and uses a cluster-wide key. The encryption works across deduplicated and compressed data. Encryption will be included only in the vSAN Enterprise edition.
The analytics provide real-time notifications and recommendations to help customers improve performance. VMware claims the analytics run in real time with no customer interaction required.
VMware also enhanced stretch cluster support in vSAN 6.6, adding the ability to provide local protection for site and component failures, site affinity and one-click witness changes. Other VMware vSAN 6.6 additions include one-click installation, improved performance for all-flash systems, optimized checksum and deduplication, and support for 1.6 TB flash drives and Intel Optane SSDs.
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VSAN now all grown up
"I would consider vSAN now to be an adult member of hyper-convergence," said Arun Taneja, consulting analyst at Taneja Group. "It was lagging behind for quite some time. It needed some growing up. The new features in this release let VMware compete across the board. They don't have to say, 'We don't have that feature yet, but will have it in the future.'"
VMware has sold vSAN hyper-converged software since 2014, but has made a flurry of releases in the past year or so to add enterprise-grade features. Like other hyper-converged vendors, VMware recognizes moving beyond virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and remote office implementations requires features such as flash support, data compression, cloud-based analytics and security.
Michael Haag, group manager for VMware storage and availability product marketing, admitted that in early versions of vSAN, "we were getting our feet wet. A year ago [version 6.2], we started to see vSAN adopted in the mainstream."
VMware reported a spike in vSAN customers after version 6.2 launched with data deduplication, quality of service, erasure coding and other features that made it more flash-friendly. The all-flash storage trend found its way to hyper-convergence in 2016, and analysts expect all-flash use to increase this year and beyond.
Haag attributed that to the falling price of flash drives.
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"We're seeing a rapid shift to all-flash," Haag said. "There are very few situations where hybrid systems still make sense anymore."
Customer: vSAN 6.6 a 'natural progression'
Kevin Hodges, client services system administrator at the University of South Carolina Upstate, uses vSAN on all-flash Cisco UCS servers solely for VDI. He said he turned to vSAN after switching SAN arrays three times for his VDI without getting satisfactory results. After testing earlier versions of vSAN, Hodges said he replaced his SAN with vSAN 6.2. He evaluated Nutanix, but found it too expensive, especially when he already had the server hardware he needed to run vSAN. The college's hyper-converged infrastructure includes nine Cisco UCS nodes for more than 1,000 virtual desktops.
The University of South Carolina Upstate currently runs vSAN 6.5, but Hodges said he plans to upgrade to 6.6 at the end of the semester.
"This is the natural progression of the product," Hodges said of vSAN 6.6. "Nothing shocking."
He said he welcomes native encryption because the university handles credit card transactions and has to meet state compliance requirements.
"The state is getting more strenuous about security requirements, so this will help us meet them," Hodges said.
Hodges said he is also looking forward to improved performance and better dedupe ratios promised in the new release. He likes the idea of one-click upgrades.
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"That's a progression you expect over time, but it sure is nice," he said. "It's a pain [when] you're trying to update nine hosts and keep them all compliant."
Hyper-convergence heads for private clouds
VMware touted encryption and cloud-based analytics at VMworld 2016 last August, but those features were missing when it launched vSAN 6.5 in late 2016. The 6.5 release focused on features and licensing changes that made it easier to use in all-flash nodes and remote offices.
Eric Sheppard, a research director for storage at IDC, agrees with Hodges that there's nothing shocking in the 6.6 features, but said "this long list of new features is important as hyper-convergence moves to a new phase" with enterprises evaluating it.
"There are times when hyper-converged deployments are replacing traditional three-tier SANs," he said. "For hyper-converged to have maximum impact, vendors have to constantly increase their features to get closer to traditional storage products. They want to convince enterprises that had thought about hyper-convergence, but hadn't seen all the features they wanted, that now is the time to deploy it."
With 6.6, VMware is also separating its vSAN release cycle from that of vSphere. Instead of waiting for the next vSphere rollout, VMware is delivering vSAN 6.6 as a patch release.
"If there's a key feature we want to push out, we can do so on our own timeframe," VMware's Haag said.
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Haag said the encryption and improved performance opens the door for hyper-converged systems to be used for big data, write-intensive analytics and stream applications.
Haag said VMware vSAN 6.6 is expected to become generally available next week.
Taneja said VMware and its main hyper-converged rival Nutanix are roughly on par in features. He gives VMware the advantage for customers who are VMware-only hypervisor shops, while Nutanix has the edge for multi-hypervisor implementations. Nutanix supports Microsoft Hyper-V and its own open source Acropolis Hypervisor in addition to VMware hypervisors.
Taneja said the race is on now for hyper-converged infrastructure vendors to turn their products into private cloud building blocks. He said hyper-convergence lends itself to cloud because it places compute, storage, virtualization, and eventually, networking, in one box.
"The holy grail is to give me a cloud-like experience," he said. "There's no doubt in my mind that customers prefer that to be built on hyper-converged infrastructure."
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Dell EMC will keep Cisco Vblocks, Nutanix XC Series hyper-convergence
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
AUSTIN, Texas -- Although Dell's acquisition of EMC created a combined company with a plethora of storage and server products, Dell EMC will keep selling competing products from Cisco and Nutanix.
Dell EMC executives at Dell EMC World this week said they are determined to maintain close partnerships with Cisco and Nutanix in their converged and hyper-converged division.
EMC has sold Cisco Fibre Channel switching for close to two decades, and the two companies combined with EMC-owned VMware to start VCE converged infrastructure in 2009. EMC bought controlling interest of VCE in 2014 and brought it in-house as its converged platform division, but continues to sell Vblocks consisting of Cisco servers and networking, EMC storage and VMware software. And convergence remains a key strategy for Dell EMC.
"Converged infrastructure and hyper-converged, that's where the world's going," Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said.
Dell EMC has integrated Dell PowerEdge servers into a handful of EMC products since the merger closed Sept. 7, including VxRail hyper-converged appliances, ScaleIO block storage software and Elastic Cloud Storage. Cisco's Unified Computing System server is a major PowerEdge competitor, leading to speculation that PowerEdge will replace UCS in Vblocks.
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Not so, said Chad Sakac, president of Dell EMC converged storage platforms. Sakac pointed to his division's annual revenue of roughly $3.5 billion as a sign of customer affinity for buying Vblocks with Cisco technology.
"The first rule of business for me is: Don't punch your customers in the face," he said. "Vblock customers are very happy with how Vblocks are architected. We have no plan to replace the blades and components inside Vblocks. Period. Stop. End of story. It's a good, happy, profitable business that's growing. There is no gain in doing a swap of those components."
PowerEdge-based VxRack launches
Dell EMC Tuesday launched the VxRack System 1000 hyper-converged infrastructure with PowerEdge R630 and R730xd servers. The System 1000 platform will be available by the end of the year, consisting of 20 configurations, including a remote-office model that starts at less than $45,000.
The VxRail has been shipping on Quanta servers since February. The 1000 platform will continue to use VMware VSAN hyper-converged software, and it will move to VSAN 6.5 soon after it becomes available late this year.
"Are we going to leverage PowerEdge in hyper-converged? Hell yeah," Sakac said. "In one fell swoop, we made our hyper-converged offering 25% smaller, 40% faster and with 200% of the flash. And we went from 12 configurations to 250 configurations."
Still, Sakac said not everybody wants VMware virtualization, so Dell EMC will continue selling the XC Series built on a 2-year-old OEM deal between Dell and Nutanix. The XC Series includes Nutanix hyper-converged software on
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PowerEdge hardware. Like Vblocks, Sakac said XC hyper-convergence is entrenched in Dell EMC's plans.
Sakac said he recently visited Nutanix headquarters "to send a signal to them and customers that the Dell XC platform is here to stay."
Nutanix-XC for non-VMware shops
Sakac said there are hyper-converged customers who would like to use Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors instead of VMware vSphere. Others prefer multiple hypervisors. Dell EMC will try to sell them the XC Series.
"We believe hyper-converged will disrupt the ecosystem, and we want 80% of the market," he said. "You can't do it with an offering tied to one stack. You do it by offering choice. The XC Series is for customers who do not want to integrate themselves closely with VMware."
Bob Wambach, vice president of VCE marketing, said VxRail had more than twice as much revenue in the third quarter as the second. Dell EMC forecasted its fourth-quarter revenue to more than double the third-quarter total. That would bring it to well over $100 million for the quarter. Dell EMC's hyper-converged goal is to pass Nutanix as the market leader, but Wambach said the vendor will sell XC if it has to.
"If a customer's interested in Nutanix technology, then we want them to buy Dell EMC XC," he said.
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Dell EMC goal: Give customers more
products, fewer vendors
That fits with Dell EMC's overall goal of becoming a one-stop shop for IT infrastructure, so customers don't have to go anywhere else. The thinking behind that is customers want to deal with fewer vendors.
"We don't see many customers saying, 'We want more partners, we want more people to help us figure this out,'" said Dave Goulden, Dell EMC president of Dell EMC's infrastructure solutions group. "They don't want a bunch of point-product vendors."
Jason Grant, vice president of IT fleet technology for cruise ship lines Holland America Line, based in Seattle, is one of those customers. His company uses Dell EMC SC storage, VMware virtualization and AirWatch, as well as other Dell Technologies products. Now, he is looking at Dell EMC services and software to build out its private cloud.
"The Dell-EMC deal has made it a single point of contact for us with vast resources," he said. "As we become more cloud-based over the next few years, that will make it more seamless for us."
Rhonda Vetere, CTO of New York-based Estee Lauder Inc., said her company is a customer of EMC storage and security products and its Virtustream public cloud. She said Dell EMC's "breadth of portfolio is a key to us. Further out, we're thinking about how we can do things more quickly."
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EMC expects to pass Nutanix as HCI leader by mid-2017
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
EMC's VCE converged infrastructure group wants to unseat Nutanix as the hyper-converged market leader as early as the end of 2016 and no later than the middle of 2017.
The closing of Dell EMC Sept. 7 will result in a company combining Dell servers, EMC storage and VMware virtualization. That should make it a natural powerhouse in hyper-convergence infrastructure (HCI), which combines servers, storage and virtualization in a box.
EMC's main HCI product, the VCE VxRail, incorporates VMware's Virtual SAN (VSAN) hyper-converged software and will soon use Dell servers. Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer of Dell EMC, said VxRail has surpassed VCE's internal sales forecasts since its February release and now is gunning for Nutanix.
It will be difficult passing Nutanix this year. Nutanix reported $114.7 million in sales for the first quarter of this year - the last quarter it disclosed in its filings to become a public company - and has consistently grown sales each quarter by close to 20%. But Burton said it's just a matter of time until Dell EMC becomes the HCI leader.
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"Our strategy is to be the market leader in hyper-converged," Burton said during an interview at VMworld this week. "We consider Nutanix No. 1 today. Our goal is to get to No. 1 by the end of the year. We think it's doable, although it would be a stretch. If it's not by the end of this year, the worst case is the middle of next year. If we haven't achieved our goal by then, we're doing something wrong."
Burton said after the Dell deal closes, EMC will replace the Quanta servers it currently uses for VxRail with Dell servers.
"Building a hyper-converged infrastructure is a natural leverage point between Dell and EMC," Burton said. "It's a server-centric architecture. Dell has a great compute platform, we've got the VMware software stack, and chunks of EMC software. It's a nice collection of the assets of the various companies that we can put out the door as a single product offering."
Besides the technology, Burton said another huge advantage over Nutanix is the Dell EMC sales and distribution model. Dell EMC already has the type of massive distribution machine that will cost Nutanix more than $200 million this year to build out - resulting in heavy losses despite its market leading position. Burton compared VxRail to XtremIo, which shot past smaller competitors' all-flash arrays to generated $1 billion in revenue in two years on the market.
"With VxRail, if we get the product right and we get the messaging right, there's no reason we shouldn't be the market leader," he said.
The twist is that Dell is also part of Nutanix's distribution network. A Nutanix OEM partner since 2014, Dell sells Nutanix HCI software on Dell servers branded as the Dell XC Series. Dell renewed that agreement in June through 2021, meaning Dell Technologies will both partner and compete with Nutanix.
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"The delicate balance here is there are a lot of customers who have bought the Dell XC Series and they want to buy more," Burton said. "I think what the Dell team is trying to do is protect customer relationships. You never want a customer to be caught in the middle of a vendor battle. At least in this interim period, they're going to carry Nutanix and we have VxRail and the customer is going to decide. We're very careful not to get the customer in the firing line."
Remember that strategy. You'll see Dell EMC take a similar tact with Dell's Compellent and EqualLogic storage arrays, which both compete with traditional EMC products.
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Dell EMC gives the green light for Isilon All-Flash arrays
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
AUSTIN, Texas -- Isilon, the last EMC primary storage system to go all-flash, will join the all-solid-state club in early 2017.
Dell EMC formally launched Isilon All-Flash today at Dell EMC World. The scale-out NAS platform is part of the flash strategy the storage behemoth will lay out at its first user conference since Dell's acquisition of EMC closed Sept. 7. Last week, Dell EMC added a VMAX all-flash model along with inline compression and support for 15 TB solid-state drives (SSDs).
Also at the show, Dell EMC said EMC management and data protection applications will support Dell's SC (formerly Compellent) storage platforms.
EMC teased Isilon All-Flash as "Project Nitro" at EMC World in May but gave few details until today.
Unlike Isilon's hard disk drive (HDD) systems, Isilon All-Flash uses a bladed node architecture. A 4U Isilon All-Flash array is a four-node cluster with a capacity of 92 TB to 924 TB. Dell EMC claims a 4U chassis can deliver 250,000 IOPS and 15 GB per second of aggregate bandwidth. A scale-out cluster can support 100 systems with 400 nodes and 92.4 PB in a single file system and volume.
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Isilon All-Flash can include 1.6 TB, 3.2 TB and 15 TB MLC SSDs. Each chassis holds 60 drives.
Isilon All-Flash runs the OneFS file system in Isilon's HDD arrays, and the flash systems can be clustered with all-HDD configurations to forge a hybrid cluster.
OneFS supports NFS, SMB, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), NDMP, FTP and object storage (through OpenStack Swift). Its SmartPools and CloudPools automated storage tiering capabilities will move data across SSD and HDD media.
Data will be tiered dynamically based on performance needs. "The hybrid approach allows customers to deploy just enough flash," said Sam Grocott, senior vice president of marketing and product management for emerging tech at Dell EMC.
Isilon's history and siblings
Previous versions of Isilon arrays had small amounts of flash to store metadata. OneFS was optimized to read and write to flash for Isilon All-Flash. OneFS already supported deduplication, which can extend the usable capacity of SSDs.
EMC's all-flash platforms include XtremIO, VMAX All-Flash, Unity All-Flash and DSSD D5. EMC declared 2016 the year for all-flash for primary storage last February. Isilon won't make the cut for general availability in 2016, although it is in customer trials now. Dell EMC will begin taking customer orders next week, but the platform will not be generally available before 2017.
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Dell EMC will not provide pricing details for Isilon All-Flash until it becomes generally available.
Grocott said Isilon was the last EMC primary storage system to go all-flash because scale-out NAS use cases did not demand SSD performance until recently. But customers who see benefits of flash for block storage are now looking for a similar boost for unstructured data.
"Isilon is laser focused on unstructured data -- customers commonly scale to hundreds if not thousands of terabytes of capacity," Grocott said. "The file storage use case has not required latencies and throughput provided by flash until recently. Also, the economics of flash have changed. It's more economical to deploy now."
Grocott said the economics still favor hybrid configurations over all-flash, although he expects to see all-flash clusters as well.
"Best practice will be to take advantage of flash and hard disk drives in a combined configuration," he said. "A lot of customers will choose to build a dedicated all-flash scale-out NAS, but why do that unless you have to?"
Last to the AFA party
Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Mark Peters said EMC is going to the last area of primary storage that has been underserved by flash.
"Essentially every Dell EMC product is integrating -- or even [becoming] solely -- flash storage," Peters said. "The key roadblock in the past has been unstructured data workloads which require massive capacity scaling, cost-
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effective storage, and enterprise file system features. The all-flash Isilon looks to deliver on these points. Dell EMC is also making it easy for non-flash customers to adopt flash. The all-flash Isilon can be pooled with existing Isilon arrays, eliminating the need to rip and replace the existing infrastructure or deploy a separate silo."
Grocott said he expects media or entertainment, life sciences and Hadoop analytics customers will be most likely to adopt Isilon All-Flash.
Pure Storage's new FlashBlade will be a prime competitor for Isilon All-Flash. FlashBlade, which has a similar form factor and also targets unstructured data, is in limited release now.
Dell EMC is also adding support for EMC management applications on Dell SC storage platforms. Dell EMC ViPR Suite, Intelligent Data Mobility, PowerPath multipathing, VPLEX continuous availability and CloudArray cloud tiering will all work with Dell's legacy storage by the end of 2016. Also, Dell EMC said Data Domain disk backup, Data Protection Suite (including NetWorker and Avamar) and RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines will support SC arrays.
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Dell EMC adds VMAX 250F, support for 15 TB SSDs, compression
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
Dell EMC is giving its VMAX and Unity storage platforms larger capacity drives, inline compression and nondisruptive upgrades aimed at improving the scalability and management of all-flash arrays.
The vendor rolled out a series of enhancements today along with a new VMAX 250F model in advance of Dell EMC World next week. Besides the VMAX enterprise and Unity midrange primary storage upgrades, Dell EMC refreshed its Data Domain disk backup platform and upgraded its VPLEX continuous availability software. The launch is the first major product news since Dell completed its $60 billion-plus acquisition of EMC in September.
Dell EMC added support for 7.6 TB and 15 TB solid-state drives (SSDs) in the VMAX All-Flash and Unity arrays. Until now, EMC did not support SSDs above 3.84 TB. Inline compression extends the effective capacity of those drives.
Neither feature is unique to EMC. Data reduction through compression or data deduplication is becoming table stakes for flash arrays, and NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others already support 15 TB SSDs.
But the Dell EMC additions follow the strategy EMC laid out early this year when it declared 2016 the year of all-flash for primary storage.
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Chris Ratcliffe, senior VP of marketing for Dell EMC's Core Technologies group, said there will be more flash news next week. He called today's launch "The hors' d'oeuvres for Dell EMC World."
"Flash is the new normal," Ratcliffe said. "We've been going through a multiyear program of flash-enabling, flash-upgrading and building flash from the ground up at EMC."
With the nondisruptive data-in-place upgrades, EMC is looking to avoid a problem it had two years ago with its first all-flash platform. Back then, its XtremIO 3.0 software upgrade that added inline compression required customers to move their data off the array and then move it back after completing the upgrade.
Mark Peters, Enterprise Strategy Group practice director and senior analyst, said nondisruptive upgrades and data movement may benefit companies using flash storage more than the larger SSD capacities and compression.
"Nondisruptive movement of data significantly reduces the risk to IT organizations as well as the operational costs of managing data," he said. "These are significant budget drivers for IT organizations. New functions are more important in my view than merely enhanced features and specifications."
VMAX adds smaller footprint model
The VMAX 250F is the smallest of the VMAX all-flash series, which also includes the VMAX 450F and 850F. All three models are built on the same V-Brick architecture and HYPERMAX software. Each V-Brick consists of an engine with two VMAX directors (controllers), RAM cache, 50 flash drives and
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InfiniBand switching to connect the V-Bricks in a 4U chassis. The VMAX 250F supports one or two bricks, from 512 GB to 4 TB of system cache, and 100 flash drives. The 15 TB SSDs enable the VMAX 250F to scale to more than 1 PB before the inline compression. Dell EMC claims a fully loaded VMAX 250F can scale to more than 1 million IOPS with sub-millisecond response times.
Unlike the VMAX 450F and 850F, the 250F does not support mainframes.
The HYPERMAX enhancements work across the VMAX all-flash family. Along with compression, EMC added nondisruptive migrations for upgrading from VMAX3 to VMAX all-flash arrays, a virtual witness that allows active-active capability without requiring a third VMAX, and asynchronous replication to a third site using EMC SRDF/Metro software.
Unity gets more drives, capacity
Additions to the Unity line also include inline compression and support for the 7.6 TB and 15 TB drives. The larger drives bring Unity All-Flash's maximum capacity to 384 TB in a 2U rack. The Unity 600F now supports 100 drives -- double the previous number. EMC also added native file tiering to Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Dell EMC's Virtustream public clouds and CloudIQ cloud-based storage analytics. The cloud file tiering is native to the array, and does not incorporate the CloudArray software that EMC uses with other storage platforms.
EMC also added wear leveling that allows customers to mix different types of drives in an all-flash pool for Unity, and self-service upgrades from its older midrange VNX platform to Unity through the Unisphere management interface.
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Data Domain receives speed, capacity bump
Dell EMC launched four new Data Domain models and a software upgrade that allows movement of deduplicated data to the cloud. The DD6300 is an appliance for midrange customers, scaling to 178 TB usable capacity before deduplication. The DD6800 stores up to 288 TB usable, the DD9300 can store 720 TB and the enterprise DD9800 scales to 1 PB. The 6300 is rated for 24 TB per hour with DD Boost software and 8.5 TB per hour without DD Boost. The 6800's rated speed is 32 TB per hour with DD Boost and 14 TB per hour without it, and the 9300 can move data at 41 TB per hour with and 20 TB per hour without DD Boost. The 9800's rated speed is 68 TB per hour with and 31 TB per hour without DD Boost.
The Data Domain operating system 6.0 includes Cloud Tier software, which moves data deduped on the disk system to public, private or hybrid clouds for long-term retention.
Dell EMC also rolled out an upgrade to Data Domain Virtual Edition (VE), the software-only version of the platform that runs inside a hypervisor. DD VE 3 scales to 96 TB per instance, runs on Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, supports DD Cloud Tier, and can be deployed on EMC VxRail hyper-converged appliances. Previous versions of DD VE only supported VMware hypervisors.
VPLEX optimized for flash
Along with a performance bump, EMC optimized VPLEX for flash with UNMAP thin provisioning support and integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) across
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active-active data centers. EMC also launched VPLEX for All-Flash, which is licensed with no limit on the number of Dell EMC flash arrays or the amount of capacity protected.
All-flash for all primary? Not yet
So has this turned out to be the year of all-flash for primary storage as EMC predicted? Analysts said it was a start in that direction but may take a few product refresh cycles to complete the transformation.
"I would expect that by the time all refresh cycles are complete, most primary workloads will be on all-flash or hybrid flash arrays that utilize flash as a cache or a tier, with automated data movement)," said Ashish Nadkarni, IDC's program director for computing platforms.
ESG's Peters said, "If all primary workloads are not on flash in the time it takes for two hardware lifecycles -- about six to 10 years -- I will be very surprised."
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Dell EMC to 'stay the course' with flash storage portfolio
Carol Sliwa, Senior Writer
Dell EMC plans to "stay the course" with its flash storage portfolio despite overlapping products at the midrange and low end, an executive at the newly combined company confirmed.
Daniel Cobb, a fellow and vice president of media strategy at Dell EMC, said the company would continue to invest in all of its the flash products. That includes support for emerging technologies such as nonvolatile memory express (NVMe), NVMe over Fabrics and 3D TLC NAND flash.
"You may not always see the newest technologies first in the lowest end platforms," Cobb said. "That's usually not the way it happens. But as things continue to go mainstream and suppliers get their volumes up and their costs down and under control, we'll see the appropriate technologies end up across the whole portfolio.”•
Cobb referred to Dell EMC's DSSD rack-scale appliance as "the flagship in terms of performance and throughput" for real-time workloads. EMC's original all-flash array platform, XtremIO, and all-flash VMAX target general-purpose enterprise workloads.
The greatest potential for all-flash overlap is in the midrange. The Dell EMC flash portfolio includes EMC's new Unity-F and older VNX-F arrays. Dell holdovers include the SC Series, formerly known as Compellent, and PS Series, formerly EqualLogic.
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"Our plans there are stay the course, keep those customers happy, keep them running on the media that they're comfortable running with," Cobb said. "Both platforms have already made the move to flash."
Cobb said he expects VNX customers to "be delighted" with the new Unity product and ultimately move to that product. But he said they can stay with VNX as long as they want, much the same as Compellent and EqualLogic will be able to do.
"As [former EMC CEO] Joe Tucci liked to say, ‘I'd rather have multiple products in a portfolio and risk managing the overlaps than leave some gaps.' We're pretty comfortable doing that now. We've been doing it for a while," Cobb said.
He said EMC is able to continue to invest in so many flash product lines because it is accustomed to sharing investments such as flash management, deduplication and compression across multiple product lines.
Yet another all-flash product is on EMC's roadmap. Project Nitro, an all-flash version of its Isilon scale-out NAS array, is due to be equipped with more cost-effective 3D TLC NAND flash to target file and object workloads. Cobb provided no updated timetable for Project Nitro.
EMC already held a commanding 40% market share for the second quarter of 2016 in the all-flash array (AFA) market, according to a report released by International Data Corp. (IDC) this month. NetApp (16%), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (13.8%), Pure Storage (11.5%) and IBM (8.7%) trailed by considerable margins.
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Dell's SC and PS Series arrays do not qualify for IDC's AFA stats, because they're only all-flash configurations of hybrid flash arrays, according to Eric Burgener, a storage research director at IDC. EMC products factoring into IDC's second quarter statistics were XtremIO, VMAX All Flash, Unity-F and DSSD D5, Burgener said.
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DSSD D5 flash appliance sales cease, Dell EMC says
Garry Kranz, Senior News Writer
Well, EMC promised blazing speeds for its DSSD flash appliance. And, now, it's been pulled off the market almost before you could say, "DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash appliance."
Dell EMC has stopped selling its stand-alone server-based DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash appliance, barely a year after it launched. How's that for fast? Even EMC's ill-fated Invista storage virtualization switch lasted longer than that.
After forecasting "face-melting" speeds in the run-up to launch, Dell EMC quietly pulled the plug on DSSD last week. It said all instances of the Dell EMC DSSD D5 system are off the board, including a hardware model unveiled in September built on Dell PowerEdge R730 servers. That rollout marked the first new product following the Dell-EMC merger.
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Dell EMC intends to incorporate DSSD technology into other storage servers and flash arrays, and the vendor will use it to help bring NVMe products to market. The vendor said it will continue to support existing DSSD D5 customers, but is not adding new sales.
Dell EMC: DSSD customers wanted data
services, not just fast flash
EMC in 2014 acquired the server-side flash technology from startup chipmaker DSSD. EMC spent nearly two years turning the technology into a shipping product, but found little market for the 5U rack-scale shared flash storage system after its 2016 launch. In the fourth quarter, DSSD flash contributed a meager $1.9 million to Dell EMC's market-leading $645 million in all-flash revenue.
The Dell EMC DSSD product was aimed primarily at enterprises running real-time database applications and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. That turned out to be a smaller niche than anticipated. Lack of integrated data services hindered customer adoption, said Sam Grocott, a Dell EMC senior vice president of marketing for storage and data protection.
He said HPC customers are embracing flash in servers for shared storage, while enterprise customers want more than fast storage.
"The early adopters told us the performance was off the charts. But they wanted DSSD integrated on a VMAX, an XtremIO array or a server," Grocott said. "Folding it into existing products gives us an opportunity to turbocharge our entire all-flash portfolio."
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The Dell EMC DSSD D5 direct-attached storage uses proprietary NVMe over PCIe flash modules to connect multiple servers. Cubic RAID provides intelligent data protection across large shared storage environments.
The native DSSD features are transferable to other Dell EMC flash storage, Grocott said. That will help Dell EMC more quickly bring its first NVMe-based flash system to market this year.
Dell EMC is discontinuing DSSD sales, as other storage vendors launch systems that replace solid-state drives with custom flash modules. Hitachi Data Systems designed its Virtual Storage Platform F array with its custom flash module drives. All-flash vendor Pure Storage Inc. added system-on-a-chip FlashBlade for performance-oriented big data analytics. IBM DeepFlash and Western Digital's SanDisk IntelliFlash reference architecture are other examples.
Greg Schulz, a senior advisory analyst at StorageIO in Stillwater, Minn., said integrated Dell EMC DSSD technology provides more value than selling it as another flash system.
"Dell EMC has plenty of storage systems, so why rush to make yet another storage system as opposed to articulating where and how DSSD can complement what it already has?" Schulz said.
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Enterprise flash storage to speed up in 2017
Carol Sliwa, Senior Writer
Flash storage -- and its adoption rates -- will get even faster in 2017, according to the industry's top technologists.
CTOs and other technical leaders at the top storage vendors predict enterprise flash storage adoption will accelerate, as denser drives hit the market and prices continue to drop. And they expect speedier flash thanks to a new wave of latency-lowering nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) solid-state drives (SSDs) and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) technologies.
Taking full advantage of the latest NVMe and NVMe-oF technologies will require architectural work by legacy storage array vendors. That will leave an opening in 2017 for startups to impress users in need of ultra-high speed and low latency solid-state storage for demanding workloads.
Also on the enterprise flash storage horizon for enterprises that can't get enough performance are new memory media, such as 3D XPoint from Intel and Micron and Z-NAND from Samsung.
Below are predictions from storage industry technical leaders on what the world of enterprise flash storage -- and solid-state storage, in general -- will look like in 2017 and beyond.
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Enterprise flash storage adoption
accelerates
Daniel Cobb, Dell EMC fellow, VP of global technology strategy, Dell EMC: We're going to continue to see an accelerated adoption of flash, even beyond what's predicted. More 3D NAND fabs are coming online, and they're getting to the point where they have great process yields in place. As we emerge from this little industry flash shortage we've been experiencing during the transition, we'll watch flash adoption continue to accelerate.
Hu Yoshida, CTO, Hitachi Data Systems: Flash is going to be the dominant storage media, and that enables us to focus less on trying to tune and manage storage. You don't have to worry about whether this is tier one or tier two or which applications should run on flash. It's all flash. The tipping point has come. It's no longer a price or performance issue. The roadmap for flash is even better. Flash capacities are going to increase dramatically with new technologies like 3D and TLC. The industry is saying by 2020 we'll get to 128 TB flash modules, and that means the price comes down dramatically.
More storage vendors and companies that make their own storage, like Google and Facebook, will start to build their own flash modules as they realize the benefits they can add. They can put more intelligence into the flash module and make flash much more efficient because it is programmable. They can add functions like compression without any performance impact in the controller upstream. Another thing we can do, with programming in the flash drive, is shred the flash drive. When we get a command to erase, we just reformat all the cells, even the cells that are not seen by the controller. This is important for privacy requirements.
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Vincent Hsu, IBM Fellow, VP and CTO, IBM Storage: In the short term, there will be aggressive adoption of 3D TLC. We have seen people working on [quad-level cell] QLC, four bits per cell. It's very early right now. But I think you will see that happening at the end of 2017. Because of the density improvement, we see flash taking over more workloads. It's no longer just online transaction processing (OLTP). We have seen people asking for all-flash file and object storage, and I think we will see more of those kinds of requests in 2017.
NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics on the way
Cobb, Dell EMC: We'll stop talking about NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics and start shipping them in 2017. I'm finally seeing a rich ecosystem of NVMe drives take its place alongside the SAS protocol that's existed for so long in storage. And NVMe over Fabrics will represent a new way that hosts talk to storage. The industry won't move wholesale to those new technologies, but will start to move in the sweet spots. We'll start to see use cases where the lowest possible latency or the highest possible throughput will find willing customers. And that could be across external storage, internal or DAS [digital attached storage] storage in servers, and hyper-converged infrastructure.
Matt Kixmoeller, VP of products, Pure Storage: The dominant flash technology is going to change from SATA and SAS drives to NVMe drives, and open up the next generation of performance and efficiency. We're now starting to see the availability of dual-ported NVMe drives to make it viable for enterprise all-flash arrays. It's going to be a pretty big transformation for all-flash array architectures. It's not something that you can easily retrofit. It'll require an evolution of both the hardware design and the software architecture to make the
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most of NVMe. The first wave is going to be NVMe devices and using NVMe within all-flash arrays.
The next wave is the NVMe over Fabric transition. This one is pretty exciting because it starts to change the relationship between DAS and SAN storage. If you look at many of the new-school applications -- Hadoop, Spark, Cassandra, all the NoSQL databases -- many of them were architected around the model of server DAS storage. They're typically deployed on white box servers with local-attached flash or disk inside. NVMe breaks down the barrier to where networked storage could have the same performance profile as local DAS.
J Metz, R&D engineer, storage networking and solutions, office of the CTO, Cisco Systems Inc.: NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) devices will begin to emerge but not really shake up the storage architecture. Initial deployments will replicate existing features and functionality to gain performance benefits, but they won't really change the game -- yet. True imaginative solutions won't hit customers' comfort zones en masse until well into 2018, but early adopters will find some interesting proprietary solutions from startup companies in 2017.
(Metz noted that his predictions are personal and do not represent those of his employer.)
Martin Skagen, CTO of data center infrastructure division, Brocade Communications Systems: We will see all-flash arrays break the 10 million IOPS barrier and NVMe will be a contributor to that advancement. NVMe is really Flash 2.0. When we started out with flash years back, there was one kind of flash. The performance didn't vary greatly between the different types, and there were a lot of things you had to do to make it work well. Then it became more commoditized and really drove the all-flash array market.
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But NVMe is a revolution where, if you have the right kind of architecture, you can literally leapfrog performance over existing flash. It's not just swapping out your existing SATA flash with NVMe flash. There are a lot of implications to how you deal with the flash itself specifically on the controller. Maybe one or two of the traditional vendors could get there with some work, but it's a costly affair from both a software and hardware perspective. The smaller new guys have a better chance of making it because they're starting from scratch. They don't have any existing architecture they have to conform to, and their installed base is quite small.
NVMe could enable customers to drive down flash pricing. If you buy a lot of flash, it might be advantageous to not buy the flash from the vendor you buy the array from. NVMe enables that plug-and-play facility because it's a much more standardized chipset.
Hsu, IBM: There will be a huge focus on new protocols to harness the performance benefit of flash. The world is going to have multiple protocols and interfaces. One technology will not satisfy all the workloads. NVMe will be much more pervasive in 2017, and going forward, we will see the industry start investing in maturing NVMe over Fabrics. OpenCAPI allows better optimization to reduce latency. IBM Power Systems developed CAPI [Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface] years ago, and we're making it an open standard. It makes sure that your PCIe bus and your processors are coherent. It cuts tens of thousands of instructions at the storage layer and provides much lower latency. OpenCAPI claims to have 10x performance over the PCIe interface.
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New memory tech for enterprise flash
storage
Cobb, Dell EMC: New memory media will start to creep in. We're finally going to get a peek at 3D XPoint from Micron and Intel. It's not quite as fast as DRAM, but it's faster than NAND. It operates down around the hundreds of nanoseconds access times. And it'll be a great vehicle for showing off the architectural benefits of NVMe because of its low overhead and high performance. It's also going to make for an inexpensive memory device. It's probably been 20 years since the computer industry has seen a new memory medium come along.
We'll also see alternative media like Z-NAND from Samsung -- [its] response to 3D XPoint -- filling the gap between what DRAM and what flash can do. Rather than inventing a new type of media, Samsung is saying they can actually continue to make NAND faster. The industry has focused on making NAND less expensive and larger capacity, but it hasn't focused on making it faster. Samsung's approach technologically is one that's worth watching because any time one of the major memory foundries makes a bet on something, they go into it in a big way.
Milan Shetti, CTO of data center infrastructure group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Persistent memory will start showing up in compute and storage products. We will see both the DRAM form factor and the introduction of battery-backed persistent memory in what were previously disk form factors. People will first start adopting battery-backed DIMMs [dual in-line memory modules], and as different persistent memory technologies become available, people are going to start adopting [them as well]. Similar to what the consumer industry did for flash
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to bring the economics down, the IoT [internet of things] industry is doing for persistent memory. Because more and more sensors in the devices need local memory, we're going to see ... persistent memory start to become more affordable. It is going to be a multiyear journey.
Metz, Cisco: Advances in persistent memory/storage-class memory will change the nature of how applications and operating systems interact with storage. tiering solutions will collapse. Today's tier one will be tier zero. Today's tier two will be archiving. Shifts in latency and computational bottlenecks will alter the way that data is accessed and how long it takes to process. Some systems -- like some caching mechanisms -- will be removed altogether due to adding in latency and infrastructure bloat.
Mark Bregman, CTO, NetApp: Longer term, we see the introduction of the next-generation of storage-class memories. The first wave will use the new high-performance, persistent memory in storage devices. But there's less and less reason to package it to look like storage. I think we're going to see new systems architectures emerge, which may look like a system with very, very large persistent memory rather than smaller memory attached to storage. So we'll start to see the evolution of new systems technologies with massive persistent memory. And then the need for attached storage will be different and more for archive than it is for the high-performance level two or level one that we talk about today. But that's not all going to happen in 2017. We'll probably see new companies coming in with new architectures during the next 12 months. That'll be the leading edge of that wave.
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EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, developer platform get updates
Carol Sliwa, Senior Writer
EMC today launched an update to its Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and disclosed a September general availability date for Native Hybrid Cloud, with a new option for VCE VxRail hyper-converged appliances.
EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 4.0 expands multisite support from two to four data centers and four instances of VMware vCenter. The updated product also offers more granular levels of data protection and gives customers the ability to add or remove virtual machine (VM) encryption at any time.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud aims to package all of the pretested and integrated hardware, software and services that an organization would need to run traditional applications, such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Exchange Server.
By contrast, EMC's Native Hybrid Cloud "turnkey developer platform" takes aim at applications built specifically for the cloud. Those cloud-native applications tend to be API-based, always on, highly scalable and often changing, noted Kevin Gray, senior manager of product marketing for EMC's emerging technologies division.
Native Hybrid Cloud aims to accelerate the development and deployment of cloud applications. The product features EMC's Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform as a service for building, deploying and scaling applications running on top of on-premises, self-run infrastructure options and off-premises, managed infrastructure options.
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EMC made available Native Hybrid Cloud in limited fashion earlier this year for use with OpenStack cloud software running on the hyper-converged VCE VxRack System 1000 with Neutrino Nodes. When the OpenStack option becomes generally available next month, EMC plans to add a VMware vSphere-based option built on VCE VxRail 200, with a choice of hybrid or flash storage.
Gray said the new VxRail offering would give customers the ability to start small, with up to 50 application instances, and scale up or scale out as they go. He said the average number of application instances with Pivotal is 300 -- although, the number can soar to thousands.
Due next year is an on-premises infrastructure option for the container-based VMware Photon Platform on VxRack with Neutrino. Also due in 2017 is an off-premises cloud infrastructure option with EMC Virtustream, according to Gray. Until then, customers could go with VMware vCloud Air, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, thanks to Pivotal Cloud Foundry's support for those cloud services.
Gray said, once the infrastructure is in place, developers should be able to deliver applications in days, rather than weeks or months. Pivotal's self-service marketplace also offers capabilities such as application performance management, chargeback reporting, and data and business analytics. Gray said EMC is also adding monitoring and reporting technology.
Dan Conde, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc., in Milford, Mass., said large companies are most likely to see a need for Native Hybrid Cloud, but he doesn't envision the entire IT organization "morphing to become app-centric."
"Those who are managing and operating traditional apps are looking at managing in the traditional manner. They don't necessarily need a hybrid cloud
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system," Conde said. "But, then, there is a portion of the company that needs to be agile because they're developing cloud applications. They're the ones who are gravitating to Pivotal."
EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud infrastructure
The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud product for traditional applications starts with converged VCE VxBlock and hyper-converged VxRack infrastructure options. The virtualization layer on top of that includes ViPR storage virtualization, VMware vSphere server virtualization and NSX network virtualization.
VMware's vRealize management suite runs above the virtualization layer in the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, providing services such as monitoring and reporting, self-service and automation, and chargeback and other mechanisms for financial transparency. EMC plans to add support for updated vRealize Automation software, as well as new application and infrastructure workloads, later this year. On top of vRealize are self-service catalogs for the delivery of IT as a service.
"It's not just about providing a virtual machine or the networking and storage. It's putting in things like data protection policies and encryption services so that you have the protection and security you expect from a cloud platform," Gray said.
EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud can also broker services out to the cloud. The product supports EMC cloud service providers, VMware vCloud Air and Amazon Web Services.
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EMC data protection updates
Earlier this week, EMC announced data protection updates for VMware. VCE VxRail customers can expand beyond the product's built-in protection to use EMC's Data Protection Suite for VMs and Data Domain Virtual Edition.
EMC added support for VMware vSphere APIs for I/O filtering with its RecoverPoint for VMs software to enable continuous replication. Peter Smails, vice president of product marketing for EMC's core technologies division, said the integration would be significant for organizations that rely on endorsed replication for mission-critical applications.
"When you're doing replication, a lot of what you're doing is intercepting I/Os and redirecting I/Os, and replicating to multiple locations," Smails said. "We've done the integration work. It's available. And we're the only vendor that can make that claim."
EMC also noted plans at next week's VMworld to demonstrate VMware integration with its primary storage arrays, including the Unity midrange array launched in May at EMC World and the XtremIO all-flash array. The company made available a free community edition of the EMC Unity virtual storage appliance for testing and development. UnityVSA can be deployed in a VMware vSphere environment, according to EMC.
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EMC container plugin supports any block storage
Garry Kranz, Senior News Writer
EMC has contributed an open source Apache Mesos container volume driver that supports any network-attached block storage system equipped with a Docker plugin, including storage of EMC competitors.
The EMC container plugin integration for Docker is a joint project of Apache Foundation and EMC code, part of EMC Emerging Technologies Division. It builds on previous EMC container initiatives. The Docker Volume Driver Isolator module exposes native Docker functionality through a command line interface. It is part of the Apache Mesos distribution released in July.
"We're making it possible for the community to do multi-tiered persistent storage within Docker, which up to now has been a struggle," said Josh Bernstein, a vice president at EMC code.
Mesos orchestrates deployment of containers on premises or in cloud storage. The Apache Mesos cluster manager presents abstracted data center compute, memory and storage in an aggregated resource pool. Mesos resides in the kernel to isolate resources as applications are shared across a distributed framework.
Mesos lets users create a persistent volume to run a specific task from reserved disk. The volume persists on a node independently of the task's sandbox and is returned to the orchestration framework when the task is complete. If necessary, new or related tasks launch a container that consumes resources
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from the previous task. Docker recommends Apache Mesos as an orchestration layer to implement large clusters of storage containers.
EMC’s container module communicates directly with Docker volume plugins, allowing developers to request a persistent volume from any block storage running under Mesos. Mesos then passes the file request to EMC, which searches available storage to identify the volume and deliver it to the destined container host.
"Before this feature, while users could use persistent volumes for running stateful services, there were some limitations. First, the users were not able to easily use non-local storage volumes. Second, data migrations for local persistent volumes had to be manually handled by operators. The newly added Docker volume isolator addresses these limitations," according to an Apache Software blog posted July 27.
Enterprise adoption of Docker is picking up, although several hurdles remain before containers are as ubiquitous as that of virtual machines. The Apache Mesos integration foreshadows the open source EMC container EMC libStorage project. LibStorage is extensible abstraction and provisioning presented as common package for every heterogeneous storage and container runtime.
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VMware cloud services remain a concern following 2016
Ryan Lanigan, Assistant Site Editor
There are a lot of reasons that 2016 will be a memorable year for VMware, including the fact that the software company was part of the biggest tech deal of all time. VMware took a big step forward with NSX and debuted new versions of vSphere and VSAN. On the other hand, there's still confusion about where VMware cloud services stand, but VMware's decision to partner with AWS could portend future plans.
SearchVMware asked its advisory board members for their thoughts on VMware's year.
Brian Kirsch
It was a unique year for VMware for two reasons: NSX and Dell. VMware continued its efforts to integrate NSX into multiple product stacks. VMware bet big on NSX and the product could become a core part of the software-defined data center. The portability and security it offers enables a level of flexibility customers simply couldn't imagine before NSX. While NSX is ideal for everyone, pricing and licensing put it out of reach of SMBs. VMware recognized this and introduced new NSX tiers in 2016, which was a nice step forward for the company.
Dell's purchase of EMC is a bit more complex. It's neither a step forward nor a step backward -- it's more like a side step for VMware. While VMware is a public
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company, it's hard to ignore the fact that Dell now owns a large chunk of VMware. Over the past few years, Dell made several data center-centric purchases with Wyse, Quest Software and Compellent.
If Dell lets VMware be VMware, it could succeed, provided VMware finds a way to stop the current exodus of executives and high-end technologists.
While the needle moves forward with certain products, such as NSX and VSAN, VMware cloud services stalled a bit with vCloud Air. To VMware's credit, the focus change to AWS should give them -- and customers -- a boost in VMware cloud services. While it won't completely offset declining vSphere revenue, the AWS deal and updates to NSX helped VMware finish 2016 strong.
Alastair Cooke
The biggest storyline for 2016 is that VMware is embracing its cloud services position. The deal with AWS shows VMware has realized it can't compete with AWS and must partner. At last, VMware realizes there is no one true cloud, particularly not vSphere. Businesses are going to use multiple cloud services from multiple providers.
I like vSphere 6.5 -- the commitment to the vCenter Server Appliance and its HTML5 Web Client are my two favorite parts. A lot of the other features, such as live VM encryption, are good for niche use cases.
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Anthony Poh
The two key products that VMware focused on in 2016 were NSX and VSAN.
For all the features and abilities of NSX, it seems there still isn't a large user base in the United Kingdom, and I feel that pricing is the root cause. It's very hard to justify a spending a large amount on a product as diverse as NSX. Most companies haven't considered budgeting for microsegmentation or virtual networking, so, unless you can build a successful business case, NSX is generally seen as an unnecessary expenditure. I love the product, but I wish customers could see the benefits and that VMware would drop the price to encourage uptake.
I was quite surprised at how well users received VSAN. VMware poured a lot of research and development into the product, and also listened to its customers when it came to new features, such as iSCSI target and 2 Node Direct Connect.
VMware obviously saw a shift in the market toward hyper-converged infrastructure, as evidenced by the release of VMware Hyper-Converged Software. To be honest, it's probably more of a marketing gimmick than a new technology stack given that it just bundles vSphere, VSAN and vCenter. However, it serves as the software foundation for a very strong ecosystem of HCI offerings, from VSAN Ready Nodes all the way through to the new VMware Cloud Foundation platform.
The biggest announcements this year were VMware vCloud on AWS and the tech preview of Cross-Cloud Services. This is exciting for customers as it will give them the ability to run, manage, connect and secure applications across clouds and devices, all from a single pane of glass. We've obviously seen
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vSphere ESXi being used alongside other hypervisors and NSX being used to overlay heterogeneous network switches, but Cross-Cloud can overlay and manage your cloud provider of choice. Best of all, network and security policies can be applied to workloads deployed in the cloud.
VSphere 6.5 was a major release this year, and one of most popular features was the new HTML5 Web Client. It seems all customers agree that this is a welcome addition after working with the cumbersome Flash-based Web Client.
VMware tries to predict the direction in which the market is headed, and the Cross-Cloud Architecture and Cloud Foundation platforms are great products to help end users control and govern their workloads in a hybrid cloud deployment. VMware also put a lot of effort into VSAN and it's paying dividends as customers look at HCI as a replacement to traditional server and storage infrastructure.
The only gripe I have -- and it's minor -- is that VMware still charges too much for its products in comparison to competitors. VSphere revenue dropped off and they're losing a lot of customers in public sector and education, both places where budgets have been slashed. It's a shame that VMware hasn't given vSphere Standard away for free to counter Microsoft's market increase.
Rob Bastiaansen
It's good to see that VMware's product portfolio and partnerships haven't suffered from Dell's acquisition of EMC. It hasn't had a positive or negative effect -- it seems it is business as usual at VMware.
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The new version of vSphere has a ton of new features, many of which revolve around vCenter, and features that were in high demand from customers. VMware is also strengthening its position in the software-defined data center with improvements to VSAN and NSX.
VMware cloud services didn't really work out in 2016. VMware's decision to work with AWS to provide customers a platform to run VMware-related workloads shows which direction the company is headed. I would say that 2016 was a positive year for VMware; the financial results showing year over year revenue growth show that VMware is doing quite well.
Michael Stump
Honestly, I'm not sure what is happening with VMware cloud services. VMware threw a lot of ideas out there, but I don't see anything sticking. Partnering with AWS sounds like defeat to me. If you can't bring a cloud offering to market while riding on AWS' coattails, there's no helping you.
Whatever it is, VMware's cloud strategy will make or break the company, in my opinion. Unless your head is buried in the sand, you know that vSphere is not the only option for x86 virtualization. I think VMware's recent focus on pushing licensing agreements shows its real strategy: lock-in at all costs. If I were building an infrastructure from scratch today, I wouldn't just default to vSphere like I would have five years ago. Microsoft's Azure Stack is compelling because it blurs the line between on premises and cloud. You could deploy Hyper-V, run your Windows and Linux VMs on premises and connect to your Azure subscription for dev/test workloads. That's all simple enough that you don't need
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anything else from VMware. Granted, Microsoft will also push a licensing agreement, too.
But look at VMware: They're now playing catch up with the two companies: Nutanix and Microsoft. The vSphere 6.5 Web Client looks a lot like the Automated Clearing House user interface by IBM. VSphere 6.5 also has some of the VM encryption features that Hyper-V has had for a while. It's good that VMware finally offers these bits, looking to Acropolis and Hyper-V to fill out the features list on new versions of its flagship product shows a lack of innovation.
Don't get me wrong; I still have immeasurable admiration for VMware employees and their undeniable contributions to modern computing. I want them around for another 18 years. But, with serious competition and the continued internal aftershocks of the Dell-EMC deal, VMware's future is a little less clear.
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Dell software biz jettisoned to advance EMC buy, users' views mixed
Ed Scannell and Robert Gates
In the wake of Dell Technologies sale of its software business, industry watchers are debating who figures to benefit the most from from the deal. Some believe that Dell itself will most benefit, others say the customers of the upcoming Dell-EMC-VMware stand to gain the most. Still others chime in believing that neither party will.
Those seeing the upside say the deal eliminates overlap with VMware offerings -- most notably, the virtualization and management software from Quest -- thereby clearing a path for VMware to play a more integral role in the new company going forward.
"With this move, the [EMC] Federation can rely more on VMware and EMC's software, which gives everyone clearer marching orders moving forward," said Andrew Smith, an analyst with Technology Business Research Inc., in Hampton, N.H. "This should be reassuring to VMware and EMC users that Dell is investing more of a stake in their technologies."
The move also clears the way for EMC's recently announced Native Hybrid Cloud offering -- a turnkey platform for cloud-native application development designed to help IT and IT operations teams work more efficiently with developers -- to exert more influence. The platform pulls together a number of the EMC Federation's strategic offerings, including Virtustream and storage products from Pivotal, VMware and EMC. Dell also is keeping Boomi, which
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specializes in software as a service-based cloud integration and was bought in 2010.
"It's becoming clearer that their [EMC Federation's] cloud strategy is going to be built around that cloud-native architecture," Smith said. "You are starting to see some of the puzzle pieces of their cloud strategy fall into place."
Dell software sale adds clarity, but concerns
remain
Some users are heartened by the Dell software sale, because it lends much-needed clarity to what direction the would-be Dell-EMC-VMware troika is headed and how it is going to get there, such as its hyper-converged infrastructure plans.
"We have been evaluating hyper-converged systems, including VMware's, for almost a year now, but the Dell-EMC deal muddies the water," said one IT professional with a large manufacturing company in Minneapolis.
"Dell has had its own [hyper-converged] systems for a while now, but they own VMware. It's hard to know what Dell will commit to, and we don't want to be riding the wrong horse in that race."
Another IT pro wondering what the Dell-EMC merger means for buying decisions is Mark Campbell, CTO of Unitrends Inc., in Burlington, Mass. He noted that Dell and EMC have long been considered safe choices for most products, but many buyers become uneasy when vendors are sold, making them question whether that vendor is dedicated to the market. Buyers are
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always concerned about the long-term direction of a company when they have invested heavily in a mission-critical product, he said.
Dell may be clearing the decks to acquire more competitive and up-to-date products, Campbell speculated. Quest and SonicWall were sold not because Dell was confronted with a too-good-to-be-true offer, but to help finance the Dell-EMC deal expected to be approved this fall, he said.
"They've [sold] Quest -- what's next?" Campbell said.
The sale of Quest does help simplify the offerings from Dell and EMC, but they still will offer similar or duplicate products. One example is EqualLogic storage, one of three storage area network offerings from Dell.
"They have a long way to go to get rid of all the overlap," he said.
One product included in this sell-off that surprised some was Statistica, Dell's analytics software, which appeared to be playing an increasingly important role in the company's internet of things plans. Some users and industry observers said they hoped Dell would continue to work closely with the product's new owners, Francisco Partners, a private equity group, and Elliott Management, a manager of hedge funds.
All about infrastructure
Dell is not getting entirely out of the software business. The company is holding onto Boomi, and AtomSphere is at the heart of Dell's plans to establish itself as a top-tier cloud broker.
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The sale does, however, put an end to hopes of establishing a distinct Dell software identity, thereby becoming a more complete technology supplier.
Faced with declining margins in its server and desktop hardware business, three years ago, Dell decided it needed a significantly more competitive software and services portfolio to remain a viable IT competitor. To that end it, hired long-time IBM executive John Swainson to help turn Dell's software fortunes around, as he did with Computer Associates and IBM itself a couple of decades before. It also hired handful of other experienced software executives and made a series of strategic acquisitions to help with that transformation.
Despite those efforts, Dell failed to make the transition, due in no small part to the newer software executives unable to overcome the rigid, longtime hardware culture spearheaded by the sales organization.
"This marks the end of Dell's foray into building a software business," said one purchasing agent with a large insurance company in Hartford, Conn. "They have to go back to what they do best, which is focusing on infrastructure, which is what [Hewlett Packard Enterprise] also appears to be doing," he said.
Ed Scannell is a senior executive editor with TechTarget. Contact him at [email protected].
Robert Gates covers data centers, data center strategies, server technologies, converged and hyper-converged infrastructure and open source operating systems for SearchDataCenter. Follow him on Twitter @RBGatesTT or email him at [email protected].
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EMC shareholders OK Dell deal
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
In a near unanimous vote, EMC shareholders today voted to approve the storage giant's $67 billion merger with Dell.
The shareholder vote was considered one of two remaining obstacles to the deal, with regulatory approval from China still remaining.
EMC said approximately 98% of voting EMC shareholders cast their votes in favor of the merger, representing approximately 74% of EMC’s outstanding common stock.
In a press release detailing the vote, EMC repeated a phrase often use by EMC and Dell executives: "The transaction is expected to close on the original terms and within the originally announced timeframe ..." without giving a specific timeframe for the close.
“Today’s resoundingly favorable shareholder vote clearly supports our view that combining Dell and EMC will create a powerhouse in the technology industry," EMC CEO Joe Tucci said in the prepared statement. "The board and I care very deeply about, and have worked diligently to represent, what we believe is the best outcome for all stakeholders. I want to thank our shareholders for their support, as well as our customers and partners. My special thanks to the talented people of EMC for their hard work, dedication and passion.” •
Upon close, Dell EMC will become the enterprise division of Dell Technologies.
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The largest acquisition in technology history will pay EMC shareholders $24.05 per share plus 0.111 shares of VMware tracking stock. EMC is the majority owner of VMware, which will also become part of Dell when the deal closes.
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Dell-EMC deal closes Sept. 7
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
LAS VEGAS, Nevada- Dell and EMC made it official today. Dell will close its $67 billion acquisition of the largest storage vendor Sept. 7, following the transaction's official approval today by China's Ministry of Commerce.
Executives from both companies had projected the Dell-EMC deal would close within a year of its original disclosure, which was last Oct. 12 The Sept. 7 closing date makes it with room to spare.
Jeremy Burton, EMC's president for products and marketing, said the process went as smooth as possible from the deal's announcement to close. Burton will become chief marketing officer for Dell EMC after the close. Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell said in May that his company will change its name to Dell Technologies following the close.
"I'm really sorry there wasn't more drama in this whole merger," Burton said in interview at VMworld. "The whole process has been unremarkable. We always figured China would be the long pole in the tent, and it was."
There was little drama about the deal at VMworld, although EMC-owned VMware is part of Dell's acquisition. Michael Dell appeared with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger during the Monday keynote, but the official news release about the closing went minutes after today's keynotes ended without fanfare.
VMware- chief communications officer Oliver Roll opened the post-keynote press conference by relaying news about the close. "We're pleased about that,"
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Roll said, and the rest of the press conference focused on products and technologies discussed during the keynote.
"This is an historic moment for both Dell and EMC," Dell said in the press release. "Combined, we will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security. Our investments in R&D and innovation, along with our 140,000 team members around the world, will give us unmatched scale, strength and flexibility, deepening our relationships with customers of all sizes."
The release also quoted EMC CEO Joe Tucci: "I am proud of everything we've built at EMC - from humble beginnings as a Boston-based startup to a global, world-class technology company with an unyielding dedication to our customers. The combination of Dell and EMC creates a new powerhouse in the industry - providing the essential technology for the next era in IT."
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Dell EMC now 'open for business'
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
The world's largest storage company is now officially known as Dell EMC following the completion of a $60 billion-plus acquisition of EMC by Dell Technologies.
The blockbuster deal closed today amid fanfare from both sides. The close marks an 11-month transition period that began last October when Dell first disclosed its bid for EMC.
Most of the details disclosed today were not new, and questions about overlapping products and technologies will linger over the coming months.
"Dell EMC is open for business," said David Goulden, formerly CEO of EMC's information infrastructure storage group and now the president of Dell EMC's infrastructure solutions group.
The new parent company, Dell Technologies, includes Dell client services, Dell EMC, VMware, Pivotal, RSA, Boomi, SecureWorks and Virtustream.
The Dell EMC brand includes EMC's information infrastructure and Dell's enterprise solutions group -- servers and networking -- along with RSA security and Virtustream public cloud offerings.
Dell Technologies is privately controlled, although VMware stock will still be publicly traded. Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell and investor Egon Durban join VMware's board of directors, replacing outgoing EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci and John Egan, son of EMC founder Richard Egan and an EMC
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director since 1992. Durban, a partner at investment firm Silver Lake, has been a Dell director since the company went private in 2013.
"The formation of Dell Technologies is an industry landscape-changing event," Michael Dell said on a conference call to discuss the new company.
Few of the changes to Dell or EMC were disclosed, other than the merger makes for a much larger company and takes EMC private as part of Dell Technologies. "We don't have to cater to short-term thinking of the market. We can think in decades," Dell said of the advantages of being privately controlled.
He said by avoiding being governed by short-term concerns, Dell Technologies will be able to grow parts of its business much quicker than a large company normally can.
Little mention of products, staffing
Executives on the call sidestepped most questions about products and layoffs. Goulden said the mission of Dell EMC will be to provide customers with a way to embrace cloud-native applications alongside their traditional apps. This will be done largely through a hybrid cloud strategy and emerging products, such as flash, hyper-converged, software-defined and scale-out NAS, and object storage.
When asked about product overlap, Dell CFO Tom Sweet said, "We are committed to our product families." He said the company will "think our way through" future product directions, but, "in the interim, we want to reassure our customers that we want to support all of our product families as we move forward."
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When asked directly, Dell said there were no plans to merge Virtustream with any of VMware's cloud technologies.
Much of the overlap between the two companies is with the storage products, and no product specifics were given on the call. But in a blog this morning, EMC's president of core technologies, Guy Churchward, wrote that Dell EMC is "100% committed to supporting both EMC Unity and the Dell SC Series (Compellent) going forward."
Churchward described the SC Series as a "value-oriented family" for small and medium businesses used largely by Dell server customers. He characterized Unity as general-purpose midrange storage for block, file and unified workloads for all-flash, converged, hybrid and virtual deployments. He wrote that Unity will add all-flash data services in "a few weeks."
Churchward did not mention the Dell PS (EqualLogic) or EMC VNX midrange storage.
Another interesting area of overlap is hyper-convergence. Dell and EMC both sell systems running VMware's Virtual SAN hyper-converged software, and Dell also sells appliances running software from VSAN rival Nutanix.
Between Dell, EMC and VMware, the deal affects a large percentage of the IT customer base. Attendees at VMworld last week said they were looking for clarity from Dell Technologies on the future of its expanded product portfolio.
Brad Tompkins, CEO of the VMware User Group, cited the Dell deal as one of the biggest concerns among VMUG members.
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"It's obviously got people talking," Tompkins said. "It's just the uncertainty. What is it going to mean?"
Tompkins said he was happy to see Michael Dell at VMworld, especially because Dell talked about keeping VMware's open ecosystem.
"Dell has said VMware is one of the crown jewels in this acquisition," he said. "He's a lot smarter than I am, and he knows what he's doing. But it will be nice once that gets behind us. ... If customers do have a little uncertainly, you always have that FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] out there. Once that gets behind us, people will say, 'OK, this is what they said and they're doing it now, and that's how things are going to go.'"
Michael Noone, senior system architect of VMware customer Sugar Creek Packing Co., based in Cincinnati, said he is looking for as little change as possible in the way VMware is run.
"I'm not sure how to feel about [the acquisition]," he said. "Hopefully, it's status quo and things will keep going the same way. But there's always potential for it to go wrong, for something to happen. I can't imagine VMware is going to change much. I'd be more nervous if I were an EqualLogic or Compellent [customer]."
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Dell EMC injects PowerEdge into ScaleIO Nodes, DSSD
Dave Raffo, Editorial Director
The Dell-EMC merger is barely a week old, and the combined company has already merged Dell servers into two EMC storage products.
Dell EMC today launched ScaleIO Ready Node, a software-defined block storage system that will ship on Dell PowerEdge x86 rack server. The flagship Dell EMC ScaleIO Nodes system is an all-flash configuration.
The new ScaleIO Nodes comes three days after the launch of the Dell EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash system that combines PowerEdge R730 servers with EMC's rack-scale flash array.
ScaleIO among several Dell EMC 'Server
SAN' products
ScaleIO software runs on server clusters to provide the benefits of a storage network. ScaleIO SANs require a minimum of three nodes, and Dell EMC claims it can scale to thousands of server nodes. Customers can also download ScaleIO software and run it on their servers of choice.
Jyothi Swaroop, Dell EMC head of product marketing for software defined storage, converged infrastructure, called the move to Dell PowerEdge servers "a natural progression."
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EMC previously made ScaleIO available as part of a VxRack configuration on Quanta servers. Swaroop said Dell EMC will no longer sell the VxRack product but may add a new VxRack lineup with Dell servers.
The new ScaleIO Nodes can include hypervisors to run as hyper-converged systems. They support VMware vSphere, Microsoft Windows Servers 2012 and Hyper-V, KVM and OpenStack.
Dell EMC also sells VxRail hyper-converged systems built on VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) software. Dell Technologies acquired VMware as part of the $60 billion-plus EMC deal.
Swaroop said ScaleIO is designed for much larger installations than VxRail. The target ScaleIO Nodes customer is a large cloud provider or telecom company looking to build a large storage installation based on commodity hardware.
"We're going after the whales," Swaroop said. "We're going after Fortune 500 companies. We're going after deals in the millions of dollars as opposed to just five-node or 10-node deployments at small to medium businesses. The key focus area for us is large-scale customers who want to start small and grow to thousands of nodes."
Dell EMC will install DSSD cards in
PowerEdge boxes
Dell EMC rolled out its DSSD D5 flash with PowerEdge at the SAS Analytics Experience conference Monday. The DSSD D5 is a rack-scale server-based
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flash system designed for analytics and other extreme performance applications.
The DSSD integration with Dell servers isn't as deep as with ScaleIO Nodes. The goal is to make it easier to set up 2S/2U PowerEdge R730 servers with DSSD, which requires customers to use proprietary adapter cards with their servers. Dell EMC will factory install DSSD client cards with the PowerEdge servers to facilitate implementation.
Matt McDonough, senior director of product management and marketing for DSSD, said there are no plans for similar arrangements with other server vendors.
"Dell was a big focus because roughly 65% of our existing customer base was buying PowerEdge rack servers with DSSD," he said. "It was a natural fit."
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Dell-EMC merger: Future prospects for Virtustream, VMware, Pivotal
Spencer Smith, John Moore
At this week's Dell EMC World conference in Austin, Texas, executives from companies under the Dell Technologies umbrella discussed the benefits of the new organizational structure.
One of those executives was Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream, a Bethesda, Md., public cloud infrastructure provider founded in 2009 that focuses on mission-critical and highly regulated applications.
"When we took a look at developing Virtustream, we said that we were going to solve an engineering problem that was most characteristic of large-scale enterprise applications," Rogers said of his company's origins. "And we developed the software that allowed us to optimize running the properties of these mission-critical types of apps that take up such a large portion of the application estate of large corporations."
Now, as a unit of Dell Technologies, Virtustream has entered into a new phase of growth, he said, and the company will continue to work independently to pursue its goals, while bolstered by Dell Technologies' assets. "The way this [Dell Technologies] structure works for us and the reason that it is, quite frankly, awesome to support both innovation and growth is that we're essentially allowed to continue to do what we're doing from a product-development perspective," he said.
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"We still have our own roadmap. We have our resources that we applied toward developing our software. ... But, yet, we have the backdrop and the strength of the greater organization to call on. It gives us a lot of balance-sheet support. And it gives us a lot of reach into the marketplace. There is not a Fortune 500 CIO [who] we can't get a meeting with today."
Brandon Sweeney, senior vice president of sales at VMware, said the Dell-EMC merger allows VMware to further expand its business globally. He noted that VMware doesn't have as a strong a footprint as it would like in Asia, India and Eastern Europe. Dell Technologies also presents an opportunity to add more coverage here in the United States. "I think, frankly, Dell will help bring some operational rigor to VMware that we can benefit from as we look to scale globally."
"Fundamentally, we are a strategically aligned business unit, and we are eager to partner much more closely with Dell. ... We all know we have to run a balanced ecosystem to drive the overall numbers, but there's a tremendous opportunity for [partners] to help us better align around our go-to-market motion and make sure it's really simple for [partners] to drive customer solutions," he said.
In terms of the mutual benefit, he said he believes VMware will help Dell by driving customer conversations, citing software-defined data centers, hybrid cloud and mobile devices as a few examples. "The ability to marry all of these technical [lenses] together to make it easier for our customers, enable them on a digital journey, I think it's a tremendous opportunity," he said.
Finally, for software and services company Pivotal, the Dell-EMC merger has ushered in important research-and-development and engineering capabilities.
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"I think there's an environment out there where companies have essentially been adapting to the cloud era in their industry, and more and more people feel if they don't have differentiating software behind their offering, they're going to fall behind. That's happening at a time where, over the last 10 years, people have been trying to outsource a lot of what they do in software development," said James Watters, senior vice president of Pivotal's product and business development organizations.
"At the boardroom level, software proficiency has become a hot topic that people care about. And that's really important as you look to build a business with Pivotal -- that this is a boardroom-level topic, and that's what's so unique about it."
In this environment, vendors need "a whole set of assets to compete ... because when you're at the boardroom level, they care about the end-to-end throughput in productivity. They're not as much as worried about the best of breed at every layer there," Watters noted.
"The idea that we have this unified set of businesses where I can go to our companies and say, 'Oh, there are six engineers from VMware that are on Cloud Foundry as a project. This thing's going to work well together.' ... This is the kind of end-to-end engineering relationships the customers need," he said.
"You can't just hand them nine different best-of-breed parts and say, 'Good luck,' anymore. The speed of business is really fundamentally changed from that era."
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Wipro to purchase cloud consultant Appirio
Wipro Ltd., a consulting and business process services firm based in Bangalore, India, has agreed to acquire Appirio, a cloud services company with headquarters in Indianapolis. Appirio was one of the few large independent cloud consultancies specializing in Salesforce following Accenture's purchase of Cloud Sherpas and IBM's acquisition of Bluewolf.
Wipro said it will consolidate its Salesforce and Workday cloud applications practices under the Appirio brand. The transaction, valued at $500 million, is expected to close by year's end.
In another services deal, Sutherland Global Services, a business process outsourcing company based in Rochester, N.Y., has acquired Nuevora, a big data analytics firm.
Unified Office grabs slice of quick-service
market
Unified Office Inc., a managed service provider (MSP) for voice over IP communications, has deployed its unified communication service and business analytics package at Pizza 911, an independent pizza restaurant franchise in Manchester, N.H.
Ray Pasquale, CEO and founder of Unified Office, said his company, based in Nashua, N.H., targets high-volume verticals. Quick-service restaurants, such as
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Pizza 911, have become an important market niche for United Office. The company also does business with Domino's Pizza.
United Office also works in the fast casual sector of the restaurant industry. Pasquale said his company's unified communications offerings increase order and reservation volumes.
Other news
Here's a look at highlights from the week:
Prodapt Solutions, an outsourcing services firm, has inked a strategic alliance with Blue Prism, a robotic process automation software provider. In addition, Prodapt launched its Telebots framework, which provides prebuilt process automation for the back-office operations of its communications service provider and digital service provider customers. Prodapt has also launched an RPA center of excellence, which provides consulting, process automation and transformation services.
BeyondTrust, an information security software company, has added three companies to its partner program: KeyData, Novacoast and Sila Solutions Group. The companies provide identity and access management, as well as privileged access management services. The partnerships follow last month's launch of the BeyondTrust MSP Program.
CoreDial, a white-label cloud communications provider, unveiled the Partner Success Program. The program offers tools to help transition customers from legacy phone systems to cloud-based communication
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services. Partners can also access marketing campaigns, sales materials, and training and certification.
Rancher Labs, a container management software provider, unveiled its Rancher Partner Network, a partner program the company said aims to expand its global reach and boost enterprise adoption. The partner program will support consulting firms, systems integrators, resellers and service providers. The company is working with an initial group of partners that come from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The company's container management platform ships with fully supported commercial distributions of Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Mesos, according to Rancher.
SolarWinds MSP, an IT service management software provider for MSPs, integrated its MSP Risk Intelligence software within its remote monitoring and management cloud platform. MSP Risk Intelligence works to help MSPs assess their customers' networks for application and OS vulnerabilities, as well as determine the risks for data breaches and cost of potential breaches.
Atera has integrated Splashtop Inc.'s cross-screen access, support and collaboration offering into its IT automation platform for MSPs. Atera's platform combines remote monitoring and management, professional services automation and remote access.
TierPoint, an IT infrastructure service provider, has joined the Amazon Web Services Partner Network. Under the arrangement, TierPoint's Seattle data center has become the first TierPoint site to become an AWS Direct Connect location. AWS Direct Connect, according to TierPoint, provides a private, low-latency network connection to Amazon Web Services' cloud offerings.
Computer Market Research Ltd., a channel data management software and services company, is set to release Automated Distributor Claims Management, its latest cloud-based offering. The product targets the
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process of managing back-end rebate price adjustments on claims that channel partners submit. The company said the product is designed to help manufacturers identify erroneously submitted claims and eliminate overpayments.
The Market Share is a roundup published every Friday.
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Court to Dell EMC: Nexsan Unity branding gets priority
Garry Kranz, Senior News Writer
Nexsan won a court victory over Dell EMC, right in the giant’s back yard.
A Massachusetts federal district court sided with Nexsan Inc. this week in its trademark dispute with Dell EMC over use of the Unity brand name. The ruling gives Nexsan Unity priority based on the timing of Nexsan’s patent request. The decision also dismisses Dell EMC’s claim of patent infringement.
It allows Nexsan to continue selling its Nexsan Unity multiprotocol storage array. Unless Dell EMC decides to appeal, the Hopkinton, Mass.-based division of Dell Technologies would need to come up with new branding for the EMC Unity midrange array it launched last year. Dell spokeswoman Lauren Lee said the company does not comment on pending litigation.
Nexsan CEO Ron Bienvenu hailed the court’s decision in a prepared statement. “Nexsan filed its Unity trademark application first, and so we are extremely pleased today that the court has given Nexsan priority.” •
The dispute arose nearly a year ago, as EMC was finalizing its merger with Dell. Nexsan Unity was launched in April 2016, one week before EMC formally christened its rebranded VNX/VNXe hybrid arrays at EMC World 2016.
EMC claims it used the Unity branding in customer presentations as early as March 2015 and threatened Nexsan with legal action unless it abandoned the
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brand name. Nexsan countered by filing a complaint for declaratory judgment for priority to use the mark.
The decision hinged on the timing of the respective vendors’ trademark request with the U.S. Patent and Trade Office. In its court filing, Nexsan said it registered the trademark and serial number for Nexsan Unity on March 22, 2016 with the U.S. Patent and Trade Office. EMC filed its patent registration 38 days later, on April 29, 2016, and formally unveiled the EMC Unity product on May 2.
Nexsan is wholly owned by NXSN, a holding company owned by Spear Point Management Capital LLC and Gsubsidiary Inc. (formerly Imation Corp.). It claims more than 100 customer installations of Nexsan Unity since the product became generally available in September. The platform supports block, file and object storage with enterprise file sync and share.
Dell paid more than $60 billion to acquire EMC in 2016. The merger closed last September, creating a company with annual revenue of more than $74 billion.
