LAS VEGAS – EMC Corp. is in a gambling mood at the EMC World conference, coincidentally held in Sin City. The Hopkinton, Mass.-based vendor will pay $1 million to the first customer of an XtremIO all-flash array who can prove the system’s inline data services have switched off or have throttled back to a default state.
The EMC XtremIO $1 million Guarantee promotion runs until Sept. 30 of this year. The reason for the guarantee in the first place is to showcase EMC as a major flash player for inline availability with XtremeIO all-flash array. Another reason is to expose the shortcomings of competing solutions.
“There is a lot of hype around flash right now,” said David Goulden, CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure (EMC II). “Companies are making false claims on what they can and cannot do. We are different and we thought the best way to demonstrate it, especially since we are in Vegas, was to offer the $1 million guarantee. So we did.”
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David Goulden, CEO of EMC II
Goulden believes this guarantee will help EMC pull away from these all flash box competitors. Goulden did not mention any competitors but the speculation at EMC World is that the EMC II CEO is calling out Pure Storage of Mountain View, Calif., with this $1 million promotion.
Pure Storage recently raised $225 million and its CEO Scott Dietzen said that this capital financing positions his company for long term independence.
To be fair, CDN also sees these all flash vendors making an impact in the marketplace.
Major vendors:
- Cisco with the Whiptail acquisition,
- Dell with Compellent acquisition,
- Hitachi Data Systems (HDS),
- IBM, and
- NetApp.
Then there are specialist all flash vendors such as Fusion-IO with its Nexgen technology and Nimbus Data.
Pure Storage is not the only start-up either. Coraid, SolidFire, and Violin Memory are others in the all flash box market.
Pure Storage is doing its ownbit of Guerrilla marketing this week, hosting a smaller conference on the Las Vegas strip on all-flash array storage, competing with EMC World.
Goulden isn’t really worried about paying out on this promotion. “I’m not worried about paying it. I just wanted to highlight the difference and how we compare to all these other flash boxes. Some of these boxes have leftovers from disk storage,” he said.
The $1 million guarantee wasn’t the only promotion launched at EMC World. EMC also unveiled a trade-in program called the All-Flash Array Rescue Program. The program offers customers who have purchased a competing all-flash array to trade it in to EMC for a new XtremIO systems. Details of this program were not released.
EMC is making its way in the all-flash market. The company has shipped 73 petabytes of flash storage in the last four quarters. According to Goulden, the entire written works of mankind from the beginning of history in all languages is only 50 petabytes.
The fine print on the $1 million guarantee is that EMC is the final arbitrator and they will only offer it once. This feels to me as just flashy marketing speak.
If they were really serious about doing a comparison, put the $1M in escrow and hand the keys to someone comparatively neutral like Gartner or IDC to judge and if they really meant guarantee then leave it open for more than the first person.