Monday 5/19/2008: EMC World kicked off this morning in Las Vegas NV with a packed house of 9,300 users from 85 countries and 128 sponsors. EMC is hosting 556 sessions geared toward the techical customer. Joe Tucci began the conference with a high level overview of EMC's Information Infrastructure strategy. Tucci didn't provide any earth-shattering news but rather emphasized some continuing and a few new themes, namely:
- In five years, customers will be managing 10X the amount of information they manage today (Source: IDC and EMC)
- Flash is a game-changing technology and EMC will have flash across its entire hardware portfolio this year (What StorageMojo said)
- Recovery from tape is too slow and within two years "all" recovery will come from disk
- EMC continues to deepen its emphasis on security via assessment, encryption, identity management and data loss prevention
- Cloud computing is a major thrust and while still fuzzy, it's clear EMC has plans for major investments in this emerging space
- Classifying and managing information by more effectively using meta data is the next rung of information management
- The "killer app" for SAN virtualization is migration and data mobility
- Green received the obligatory lip service that most vendors provide at such conferences with no real path to reducing the power budget
One clear message from Tucci is that EMC will not try to be all things to all people in Cloud Computing, rather the company will focus on services and infrastructure around information management. This implies a vision of releasing the information trapped inside of devices and applications, providing consolidated views of information and common policies to secure data. Last November, Tucci leaked Hulk (cloud hardware) and Maui (cloud software) and promised to have the products out by summer of 2008. Few details were forthcoming at EMC World other than to suggest Hulk is in Beta and Maui was the key to exploitation.
Robin Harris' take at StorageMojo.
Action Item: Customers should continue to expect EMC to make incremental enhancements designed to provide tactical customer value. EMC's grand vision is largely about executing on what's been put in place over the past five years through R&D and acquisition. One exception is Cloud Computing which represents incremental opportunities for EMC and its customers. Users should work to define requirements for this new class of computing and socialize these requirements with lines of business, partners, customers and other parts of organizational ecosystems to determine what's real, what's hype and what's missing.
Footnotes: Hitachi today announced the intent to include flash devices in its high end storage arrays by the end of 2008.
