LAS VEGAS – “It’s a crock!” That’s what Jeremy Burton, the president of products and marketing at EMC Corp., said at EMCWorld directed at those people who thought the company would be distracted in 2016 by the Dell acquisition.
And, certainly EMC has publically said its business as usual since the Dell announcement late last year and announced eight new solutions for modernizing the data centre at the conference. They are:
- EMC Unity;
- Virtustream Storage Cloud;
- MyService360;
- EMC Copy Data Management; and
- ViPR Controller 3.0.
The company also released VxRack 1000 System with Neutrino Nodes, Native Hybrid Cloud and DSSD Dual D5 to address the digital transformation business.
The highlight of the announcements is EMC Unity. Through an alliance partnership with Brocade Communications, the EMC Unity features Gen 6 Fibre Channel and IP storage networking.
The all-flash EMC Unity is being positioned in the mid-range and has a starting price of $18,000.
“There is about $2.7 trillion spent today on traditional infrastructure and we believe that spend is flatting out and declining. There is a new way of making IT investments where you can save money and that money then can be diverted to other projects in and out of IT,” Burton said.
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The strategy behind the Unity from an end user perspective is for the infrastructure helping customers modernize the data centre with flash. This will also further cloud enablement by scaling out the architecture and increasing software-defined networking environments.
According to Burton, Unity is a volume block storage product that supports VMware. “This is the year of old flash and DSS on the high end and Unity is in the mid-range. The message here is we want it all. We want to be the No. 1 supplier in multiple segments in the market with ExtremeIO and down market,” he added.
In addition, the EMC Unity solution uses Brocade Fabric Vision technology for network management through monitoring and diagnostics. EMC said this approach helps the channel to anticipate and pre-empt issues before it impacts a customer’s operations.
Burton also said that EMC is planning to release supporting products for Unity later on this year that includes an event lower cost Unity hybrid solution for approximately $10,000.
The release of Unity also comes with a special launch promotion for solution providers. EMC will be offering 10 per cent margins on any incremental deals on top of the 10 per cent a channel partner gets on registration. EMC will also give partners an additional 25 points on all flash deals for a total of 45 per cent margins.
The EMC/Brocade alliance will also see Brocade storage switches and related storage management software branded and sold by EMC as part of the EMC Connectrix line. The Connectrix Fibre Channel and IP storage networking series of products for EMC Unity will be available through the channel.