JDN asked me to post this here for yall. It's in response to a Computerworld article about Shark impinging on EMC. A re-written press release is more like it.
RE EMC and IBM: Gorillas and Sharks fighting it out
I am going to disagree with your contention that EMC is a King instead of a Gorilla. I understand that they have been given Royalty status by the thread as a whole. However, their lock on their customers is just as strong as Cisco's and NetApp's for the same reason: the software. One of those pieces of software, remote copy, is mentioned in the article. Just like IOS, a customer is not going to rip out tried-and-true methodologies just because they have found a cheaper box. Or 3Com would be ruling the router roost. That is EMC's high barrier to entry. And it's just one of the software features available from EMC. Plus, there is nothing discontinuously innovative about IBM's Shark system. In fact, it's purely a chimp play, much as AMD is doing with Intel right now.
This article has a few points that need to be cleared up:
"If IBM can take back market share, EMC's margins will be threatened,"
- That's one big IF thrown in there. That statement is true for any gorilla and their competitors. IBM is currently #3 in storage market share, behind Compaq. EMC has twice the market share of Compaq.
To keep winning customers, IBM must meet delivery dates for its software, such as a remote-copy function that's due this month, he added.
- IBM has already failed to deliver this remote-copy feature, and has pushed back delivery to about six months from now. EMC has had this function for at least five years. It is known as SRDF, and can be found on their web site. Some of the posts in response to this article described SRDF and remote-copy as the ability to move a database from one system to another. I would add the following: a) it is not limited by EMC to databases -- it is any data on the system; and b) it occurs as a back-end process and over long-haul (>10Km) distances. It occurs transparently, during normal operation. As another poster said, "It ain't easy."
Tyson Foods Inc. switched from Symmetrix to Shark last month after IBM offered better pricing. The Springdale, Ark.-based food processing company saved $100,000 by trading in Symmetrix and moving to Shark and also increased its storage capacity, said Eric Godfrey, Tyson's manager of database administration. (Little or no switching costs)
- Tyson is NOT a big player, and doesn't utilize the features of Symmetrix that the big players do. There's a little company down the road from them in Arkansas called Wal-Mart that has a whole bunch more EMC storage today than Tyson has ever bought or ever will buy. I've sold to both of these cos., and Tyson is low-cost all the way...it's the only way to win their business. As someone in the storage game, I am not impressed by this win. Show me Sabre, or Axciom, or General Motors.
Shark "is a screamer on paper," he said, but it currently lacks native Fibre Channel and has limited cache -- 6GB compared with 16GB in Symmetrix. Once IBM adds features to Shark, users will be the real winners because they will have a choice, Adams said.
- I wish I had a dollar bill for every "screamer on paper" I've been pitched. IBM has pushed out delivery of their Fibre Channel interface about six months, too. So there are now three key areas where IBM has not met EMC's feature set - Fibre Channel, remote copy, and cache size. All of those features are critical to enterprise storage buyers. No wonder it's $100K less.
I don't think that I've done much to advance my contention that EMC is a Gorilla rather than a King. Perhaps I can do more later, if anyone is interested. Otherwise, I'll shut up and go to bed now.
buck
PS Three more days till Opening Day! |
