EMC should be worried about SSPs. S8, despite what their website states, is still a SSP, their desired customer base and pitch is just a little different. IMHO, their plan is very sound, and should prove well for them.
I don't know the percentage of SSPs that have EMC equipment today, but I suspect it is pretty large. HOWEVER, I don't think you will find many SSPs which use EMC for 100% of the disk. I have talked to a few of them, and the standard theme is to legitimize themselves by buying EMC first. Then they buy low-cost competitive storage, and have two pricing structures for users.
Since the real added value for customer is the storage management, then as long as the SSP can stay online 99.9999 - 99.999999 percent of the time, and have decent backup/recovery/disaster/billing/performance systems, then endusers don't care if their data is on EMC or a no-name SCSI array.
Since the SSP model has significantly lower TCO than standard models where large endusers buy EMC by the TB and place onsite, then SSPs are really competitors to EMC in long run. Short term, they are a customer of EMC.
David |
