EMC hungry for more storage cures
EMC hungry for more storage cures
EMC took time to reflect on its recent acquisitions and successes at its Inform event yesterday, but high profile figures within the company also admitted that there is still a lot of work to be done before customers can feel 100 percent secure over their storage requirements.
Gary Jackson, vice president for partners & channels for EMC Asia Pacific, said that although the acquisition of Documentum, Legatto and VMware have provided the company with the ability to ease many storage problems, the company is spending 10-11 percent (US800-900 million) of its overall revenue each year on research and development so that it can create better solutions.
A large portion of this money is being spent on software too, to help with the process of managing storage information. Jackson said. "This level of investment is more than anybody else is spending in the whole storage area. To be a leader in the storage business, we also need to be a leader in standards. As mentioned by Howard Quenault at Public Record Office Victoria, standards is a big issue going into the future. So we want to make sure that our hardware and software systems can connect with all of the different products provided by other vendors.
"A lot of our customers do not just have EMC products, so we have to make sure that our systems are compatible with other systems so that our customers get the maximum benefit. The other big issue is to do with providing accessibility of unstructured data that is not in databases. Statistics have discovered that 60 percent of data is actually unstructured. So you can't have a storage solution that only deals with databases. Emails need to be taken care of too. Our EMC Centera product has been vital with in this area."
EMC has made it easier for customers to replicate data, when they need to recover information urgently; information can be archived and retrieved with less effort; and virtualisation software has smoothed the process of managing software stored in different areas. Jackson is also excited about the benefits customers will experience in the future.
"Most customers are adopting our solutions today to help them reap the benefit in five or so years. Our solutions offer them the chance to design a whole information architecture. It's really a strategy decision. Looking further into the future, if a customer wants to completely virtualise all of their software and have complete freedom of movement across any kind of physical server architecture, then they are going to have to wait for some of those features.
"There are some network bandwidth issues that might cause problems at the moment, external to us, but they should be addressed eventually over the next year or two. There is a lot of work we have still got to do and that's why we are investing so much into research and development to help companies deal with disparate storage databases."
Jackson believes that although not all of the technology is available today physically to deal with this vision, he added that the key architecture and strategy for going down this path and setting up this framework is open to customers today.
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