Taylor's Take on Sun Storage : Weblog

Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

My storage team and I focus on three of the most important aspects in any industry: customers, competitors and market trends. There is insight to gain and share in this role, so here is our take on Sun and Storage - Taylor Allis


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Friday Feb 22, 2008

EMC's Big Bet

So EMC just announced an all-cash acquisition of a small startup as well as a new "Cloud Infrastructure and Services" division.  And while they do A LOT of acquisitions - EMC's Chuck Hollis doesn't think this is your everyday acquisition. 

I agree with him...

As we know, Sun and others in the industry believe the future will hold utility-like "Information Data Centers" - where customers can buy/rent/lease CPUs and GBs.  An emerging buzz term for this is Cloud Computing or Storage.  Sun is building next-gen technology (another buzz word, thank you) that can be leveraged by these emerging mega-data centers - for more on this, see Greg Papadopoulos' SAS 2008 Keynote on building network-scale computing.   

So, while Sun is providing  the technology for future "Information Data Centers" - EMC is trying to become one.

Let's look at what EMC has been up to these past couple years in this space (dates are close but not exact): 

  • 2/21/08:  EMC announces new Cloud Infrastructure and Services division to be run by ex-Microsoft exec Paul Maritz
  • 2/21/08: EMC announces all-cash acquisition of Pi Corporation, developer of Personal Information Management Technology
  • 1/22/08: EMC announces EMC Fortress SaaS infrastructure &  Mozy online backup service 
  • 10/1/07:  EMC acquires online storage provider Berkeley Data Systems (Mozy) for $76M
  • 11/1/06:  EMC acquires online storage provider Avamar Technologies for $165M (Avamar is a de-dup technology, but it sits behind online storage service offerings like Arsenal's)
  • 6/30/06:  EMC buys RSA Security for $2.1B - they have security and authentication software, key in providing storage services

So, EMC's big bet looks like it is to become a "Utility Information Data Center" (for lack of a better term). 

More power to them if they can pull it off.  And while EMC may have already made its investments in storage infrastructure, software, server virtualization and security for this - they are going to need some pretty innovative server and networking technology to pull it off.  I think I may know a company ;-)

Posted at 01:11PM Feb 22, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

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