Principal Accounting Officer, Vice President & Corporate Controller, VERICEL CORP
BLOG Video: EMC World Interviews with Barry Ader & Jonathan Siegal
ESG Senior Analyst Mark Peters interviews EMC's Jonathan Siegal & Barry Ader at EMC World 2014.
About Jonathan Siegal
Jonathan Siegal, then with EMC's Core Technologies Group, discussed product announcements and strategy at EMC World 2014 and 2015. In 2014, he highlighted new capabilities for the VNX and V-Max platforms, including bringing data-at-rest encryption from V-Max to VNX2 as a non-disruptive software upgrade. He also described Project Liberty, a software-defined version of VNX that could be deployed on commodity hardware or in the cloud. In 2015, Siegal discussed the DD 9500 backup appliance, which he said delivered 1.6 times the performance and four times the scalability of competitors, and emphasized that the company's data protection strategy was centered on software, including DD 5.6 and ProtectPoint. He also referenced Project Falcon, a software-only version of Data Domain for remote offices and cloud providers. Siegal stated that the company's approach was to provide a best-of-breed portfolio integrated through automation, with Viper as a unified interface, to simplify infrastructure for customers managing hybrid cloud environments.
Transcript (6 segments)
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Narrator0:15
EMC World was in early May every year. It's just about the biggest storage-specific event. I say storage-specific for two reasons. First, the very nature of it these days means that even storage-focused events are increasingly about more than storage. You may have already seen other ESG accounts of the event, and we also produced an overview video blog. But there's always storage specificity. My blog accompanying this video gives an extended look at the key storage takeaways this year, so here I'll just offer a couple of 50,000-foot comments together with details from two. EMC's even on the storage side, perhaps especially on the storage side, this year's EMC World seemed to me to be way less marketing, more thoughtful and detailed.
To detail some of these driving thoughts, I spoke first to Bara.
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Bara1:12
One of the great things we just did at EMC World was we actually had a technology showcase. One of the key themes of that showcase was simplicity. Many of our customers these days are looking to manage more terabytes with less people, and also the skills and the business processes that customers are faced with, they need to manage things in a much simpler fashion. So some of the things that we talked about at EMC World was showing them where we're heading in terms of managing their storage based upon whether they need a diamond or gold or a silver or a bronze kind of service level. We did a demo being able to just very quickly: what host do you need, how many terabytes do you need, what level do you want, and the system automatically goes and figures it all out. So big theme for us is all around simplicity, managing your storage by business process. Good direction for us and good key takeaway from EMC World.
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Narrator2:16
You'll have noticed that the interview was shot outside a room called Tishan. That seems opposite as Tishan is famed for his use and addition of color. Anyhow, Barry covered EMC's expanded focus on simplicity, SLAs, and manageability. Now to speak about some of the key advances in raw storage components, though still with color, here's Jonathan Seagull.
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Jonathan Siegal2:38
We've made a number of great announcements over the past week on both our VNX platforms in the mid-range as well as V-Max high-end platforms. On the VNX side, we've taken a lot of the enterprise capabilities, for example, and brought them down market. We've taken data rest encryption and implementation from our V-Max and brought it down to our VNX 2 customers and made it available as a non-disruptive software upgrade for those customers. We've also done the same with VNXe. We've now blended that with enterprise capabilities from the VNX 2 such as fully automated storage tiering, fiber channel, and multi-core optimization to provide those customers with the ability to support two to three times the amount of virtual machines in a very small footprint and to still do so easily for those folks that aren't storage admins by trade. On the V-Max side, we've also done some exciting things in terms of enabling our customers that have V-Max today or are looking at V-Max to more cost-effectively deploy some of their mission-critical, latency-sensitive applications on a V-Max. So for example, what we've done now is we've introduced Flash Boost, which gives our customers the ability to essentially improve the performance for read-intensive applications by directly serving those applications from Flash. In addition to that, we've come out with new packages called Flash Power Packs, which enables our customers to more cost-effectively purchase Flash for their mission-critical workloads. So essentially, what we're enabling with the V-Max is for customers to both improve their service levels and do so in a cost-effective manner for deploying all-Flash pools within the array. And finally, one exciting thing we're doing is really software-defined storage. So we announced Project Liberty. Project Liberty is about providing new levels of freedom for our customers to deploy VNX-like software, VNX-like capabilities, software-defined VNX, and to deploy that in new models such as potentially spinning up a new VM and running it on commodity hardware, or for example running it in the cloud, or for example taking a virtualized software version of VNX and running it at a remote site. So looking at a number of exciting deployment models like that, and then getting feedback directly from our partners and from our customers in the near future.
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Narrator5:01
There's more in the written blog as I said, but for now, behind the hype, million-dollar guarantees, elastic storage, the acquisition of DSSD, and so on, some clear storage undercurrents reached the surface. Key amongst them were software-defined storage and hybrid clouds, all wrapped in simplicity. And yes, storage becoming more integrated with apps and IT as a whole. To that degree, EMC World felt like the movie trailer for a forthcoming new world of storage blockbuster.