EMC’s corporate commitment to green IT and sound ecological practices are certainly to be commended. At last week's analyst briefing, Katherine Winkler, Sr. Director Corporate Sustainability, presented an impressive array of programs ranging from waste water recycling, on-site renewable energy generation, e-waste, and hazardous materials to green packaging concepts.
However, we would have liked to see more emphasis on what EMC is doing to engineer efficiency into its storage products. Yes, EMC has drive spin down on some products (although so far that capability is limited to EDL and is not widely usable). But at the meeting, EMC placed very little emphasis on the most basic of engineering concepts such as using highly efficient power supplies and adaptive cooling techniques. While these are nitty gritty details probably not appropriate for a high level analysts meeting, we encourage customers to ask EMC to discuss its roadmap in these areas.
In fairness, most storage suppliers today are not using highly efficient power supplies, but some, like Nexsan, Verari and Xyratex, are leading the way. EMC have announced adaptive cooling with the new CX4, and it's probably a reasonable bet that this technology will find its way to both DMX and Celerra products eventually. It's also reasonable to assume that EMC engineers are committed to fundamental efficiency designs, and it's probable that EMC's internal IT department, like every other IT department, is applying green thinking. However we believe EMC needs to pull together these largely grass roots efforts and set a more forceful green leadership agenda for the entire storage industry.
Here's the bottom line: We expect EMC, as the clear storage leader, to take a leadership role in innovative green technologies and as a premier product company, be held to the highest standard of product design innovations. We believe these innovations exist or are in the works but feel EMC needs to communicate better both internally and externally about them. We have an expectation of high performance from EMC in all significant areas and feel that EMC has some work to do to live up to its brand promise with this one.
To answer the growing demand for increased energy efficient solutions, EMC has elected to promote a high level conservation approach typified by power-aware information management; a translation would be, understand your data and its impact on power, and move or manipulate the data to gain power efficiency. Virtualization, consolidation, archiving, de-duplication, tiering, and automation are the recommendations that EMC are offering in response to power conservation.
Nothing is wrong with these resource and data management techniques; quite the contrary, they can be very effective. However, a reasonable skeptic wonders whether these are shills that enable EMC to camouflage excessive power consumption in its storage products. The lack of a highly visible and meaningful commitment to drive energy efficiencies at the most basic product level would be a significant failure on the part of the world's number one supplier of data storage hardware. It was missing from the conversation in Hopkinton and needs to be placed on the front burner in our view. We understand these capabilities exist and are calling for EMC to share their roadmap more publicly.
Wikibon has requested and EMC has agreed to share details in this area, and we remain upbeat about the progress EMC can make. Our impressions are based on observations over the past 15 months, during which we have listened to EMC's public presentations and compared its commitment to green with that of other suppliers. At this point we see EMC in the middle of the pack; whether the company is poised for a strong run will become more clear in the coming months.
Action Item: It is time for Joe Tucci to unequivocally demonstrate EMC's commitment to improve energy efficiency across the spectrum, including unveiling the basic engineering innovations and roadmap on its products and empowering a green czar with the authority to commit resources. EMC expressed a credible commitment to “The Total Customer Experience” at the meeting and was rightly proud of its success to date. If customers push back and influence this metric, positive action will result. Remember lower energy consumption equates to lower operating expenses and TCO.
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