EMC's big launch contained a lot of product upgrades and impressive boxes and systems. But underneath this all seems to be a recognition that storage is not the core – it is how it is managed and the parallel tasks needed to support applications. 
EMC's big launch contained a lot of product upgrades and impressive boxes and systems. But underneath this all seems to be a recognition that storage is not the core – it is how it is managed and the parallel tasks needed to support applications. For example the XtremIO business is based on a flash array, but the positioning is less storage than application effectiveness. The partner channels have been selected not for storage expertise, but for understanding how the array can be most effective. 'Fast' is no longer enough as am array feature.
“Channel is extremely important,” says Josh Goldstein, VP marketing and product management at EMC's XtremIO. “Rather than just take this as a product, we looked at partners and selected the first wave by looking for partners with experience of VDI and virtual servers, databases, and ensuring that they had technical resource and the right other products. They can then build a complete solution around XtremIO. They really understand the database sale with XtremIO, not just how to sell the product. That is been very effective, and that is being expanded further into the EMC channel.”
This seems to be a product with some potential in the market: Having already surpassed $100m in demand within six-months of product availability, EMC believes XtremIO is the fastest-growing all-flash array, and the fastest-growing storage array in history. “There was a flood of information today,” he admits. It represents a change in both EMC and how storage is seen. “So it is not what we can do for storage so much as for the application, and what the user sees. For us this has changed in the last two years or so. When you are trying to structure your sales cycle to articulate a business vision to the CIO and everyone, we are not talking 'feeds and speeds',” he says.
It is not a straight 'feeds and speeds' sale for sales teams, either. “Flash is an enabler not just for speed, but in how everything works from the drive to the host. For example, we have done a lot of work on metadata, so we can change the way people do snapshots. Everything you do in a database environment can now be done through this efficient array.”
That is not being done now; he suggests and customers may spend a lot of time and money often using a brute force method to do all the other things, including management. “Flash is much bigger than a performance story, it is about how you get an application developed and deployed faster.”
Particularly with a flash array, the temptation must be to lead on the question of speed. “Fast is going to be a commodity; but is what you do with the speed, how efficiently you do it and how economically. So a lot of flash arrays were sold in the last few years for point target solutions; specific applications. What goes into XtremIO broadens the applications scope, however. So the value proposition is important.”
A different mindset might well be needed by the customer; “It is still early days for this in the whole market. We have to educate the customers. If they think about XtremIO it tends to be latency and IOPS and bandwidth, and what they get from performance. We have to tell them how to leverage what the array brings; performance is just one aspect.”
It changes everything all the way through; but at least, as part of EMC getting noticed is not a problem, so the marketing team is focused on building the right tools so that the sales teams understand the messages. “We are able to show them what to say to the CIO, the desktop admin, virtualisation manager, and this is very effective to show value as the story is changing in the application environment. Our sales force knows storage but also comes from application areas. This works well with the EMC sales people who work with customer engagement.”
Part of the announcement is a smaller entry level array, a configuration called the Starter X-Brick, not necessarily for smaller users, and not for different markets or other vendors, he emphasises. “We see a lot of customers, especially in Europe who want to run pilots, abut need to hit an economic point. They might say; “We want to run a VDI on 500 desktops and will judge you economically at that level. Once, we would have had to say 'you have to have a 3000 desktop system,' and this was an issue. So we have smaller systems to be competitive in the pilots, with the aim of winning the bigger business in the long term.”
The sales cycle has been shortened a lot; so VDI in particular used to have a very long cycle because of the all the technical challenges in the pilot. Then the product sales cycle got worse because what worked at 500 desktop didn't work at 2000. “With XtremIO, it is very linear, and so easy to set things up, and this makes cycles much shorter. We have also set up at-scale proof of concept labs, where we can run 3000 desktops and demo that whole environment, and that speeds the cycles. Not many people can run 3000 desktops at that scale anyway. The channel has been great at this, at taking units into their own labs and then bringing their customers through. This is mostly the EMC channel, but there are also major integrators and consultants, and government contractors. They have all latched onto this in a big way.”
The plan for this year is to hit aggressive targets: “You can imagine what goals get set when you have a trajectory like that $100m start and we have to stay on pace with that,” he concludes.