EMC Guarantees 20% Capacity Advantage for its Celerra Unified ...

Company Brief
EMC Guarantees 20% Capacity Advantage for its Unified
Storage Systems
Date: June 2010 Author: Mark Peters, Senior Analyst
Abstract: Guarantees are often used by emerging vendors because they have to; when market leaders do so, it’s
invariably because they want to. EMC now says that its customers will need 20% less raw unified storage capacity in
NAS and/or SAN configurations than they’ll need from the competition. Furthermore, EMC has recently announced
features (due this summer) that make this guarantee appear to be just the start of a far broader initiative. EMC is
aiming to drive simplicity and efficiency as core customer values. In so doing, EMC is clearly challenging its
competitors and is thereby guaranteeing not only this 20% differential, but also ensuring a market environment that
will likely generate enhanced value for many customers over the coming months.
The EMC Guarantee
For many years, the total amount of storage users needed to support application and file environments wasn’t often a
prime IT concern. The amount of raw storage needed to generate a given amount of usable storage was just math;
utilization was known, but it didn’t really drive buying behavior. You just bought more when you needed it because
getting the job done was all that mattered. The sheer growth of data and recent economic concerns have combined to
change that; while getting the job done—effectiveness—is still, of course, crucial, doing it as efficiently as possible is now
equally crucial in most IT organizations. EMC has just made a noticeable move in this arena.
The Unified Storage Guarantee: In a nutshell, EMC has announced that users can achieve any given level of usable
storage space, yet use 20% less raw storage capacity on its unified storage platform (file and/or block) than with a
competitive platform. How does it work? Users don’t need to run bake-offs on site—instead, the program is based on a
capacity calculator tool EMC has developed, which itself is based on published specifications and—where possible—both
its own and competitive best practices. If the tool doesn’t show a 20% advantage over the competitive solution, EMC
will make up the difference at no charge to the customer. In terms of details (the “nitty gritty” as EMC calls it), the
guarantee applies to all EMC unified storage arrays and is aimed at “out of the box” configurations, with no caveats on
the types of data customers will store.
Evaluating the Guarantee: EMC certainly has a plethora of analysis and background available to support its claim. The
claim is based on having an architectural approach that avoids some of the capacity reservation requirements of its
competitors for common functions such as snapshots and deduplication. As one might expect in such a competitive
market, EMC’s language is typically assertive. Its web page states:
“Efficiency is one of EMC’s fundamental strengths. Even though our competitors try to match it by
altering their systems, turning off options, changing defaults, or tweaking configurations – no amount of
adjustments can counter the EMC unified storage advantage.”
Although ESG has not formally verified the approach, the logic looks sound; however, of course, there is no point beating
one’s head against a wall on the mathematical niceties. Since this is a guarantee, and since it is backed by EMC, a
customer can’t lose. Unless EMC is embarking on a path to deliberately give away additional capacity, we can assume
that there is indeed an achievable value here. There is little more to say about the guarantee itself; EMC is making a
strong market play and is putting its money where its mouth is. Two rather more interesting questions are these:
How relevant is EMC’s position in today’s market environment?
Is this guarantee just a one-off positioning battle or is it an early indication of a bigger war to come?
© 2010 Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Company Brief: EMC Guarantees 20% Capacity Advantage for its Unified Storage Systems 2
User and Market Relevance
The market relevance of using 20% less capacity is extremely easy to determine and it goes to the heart of the efficiency
need highlighted in the introduction to this paper. While using 20% less capacity is inherently good (as long as
effectiveness is at least maintained) and while it would mean less equipment has to be bought (an obviously good thing
for users), it is also a means to an end. That end is to reduce IT operational expenditures. Specifically, 20% less disk
capacity means less power consumption, less cooling needed, less floor space required, less maintenance, and even
potentially less management overhead; in other words, less operational expense to get the same work done. And that
matters a lot: as ESG’s latest 2010 Spending Intentions survey data in Figure 1 shows, OPEX reduction is the current
number one consideration in justifying IT investments, ahead of even CAPEX reduction. 1
Figure 1. OPEX Reduction Remains the Top Consideration in Justifying IT Investment for 2010-11
Which of the following considerations do you believe will be most important in
justifying IT investments to your organization’s business management team over the
next 12-18 months? (Percent of respondents, three responses accepted)
Reduction in operational costs
Business process improvement
Reduction in capital costs
Improved security / risk management
Return on investment / speed of
payback
Improved regulatory compliance
Reduced time to market for our
products or services
10%
20%
23%
32%
36%
31%
33%
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2010.
There are other insights as to why using 20% less capacity is not only inherently good, but also particularly relevant:
When asked about their greatest challenge with respect to their storage environments, users’ responses
were surprisingly basic, even arcane: the top challenges were not things like the growth of unstructured
data, performance, or e-discovery—all these were important and made the list—the number one challenge
was “storage system costs,” number two was “keeping pace with overall data growth,” and number four
was “running out of physical space.”
Responding to a question about areas for the most significant data storage investments in 2010-11,
respondents had “more SAN implementations” at number one, followed by “data replication for offsite DR”
and “storage virtualization” (probably no huge surprises and good for EMC in any case); however “more
power efficient storage hardware” was a strong number four on the long list of responses and was ahead of
such things as data reduction technologies, tiering, and improved storage management tools.
Clearly, using 20% less unified storage capacity is an extremely relevant proposition for EMC to bring to the marketplace.
1
Source: ESG Research Report, 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2010. All statistics come from this report unless otherwise cited.
© 2010 Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
17%
30%
37%
42%
37%
54%
62%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%
2009
(N=492)
2010
(N=515)

Broader Implications
Company Brief: EMC Guarantees 20% Capacity Advantage for its Unified Storage Systems 3
Following on from some of EMC’s announcements at EMC World (Boston, May 2010), it looks extremely likely that the
relevance of this new guarantee is more likely the opening salvo in a wider campaign than it is a one-off marketing
package. The overbearing importance of economic efficiency is shown in Figure 2. It shows that “cost reduction
initiatives” are not just an aim within IT itself, but are also the most significant business driver impacting IT spending this
year and next.
Figure 2. Business Initiatives Most Affecting IT Spending Decisions 2010-11
Which of the following business initiatives do you believe will have the greatest impact on
your organization’s IT spending decisions over the next 12-18 months? (Percent of
respondents)
Cost reduction initiatives
Business process improvement initiatives
Security/risk management initiatives
Regulatory compliance
Business growth via mergers, acquisitions, or organic expansion
Improved business intelligence and delivery of real-time business
information
“Green” initiatives related to energy efficiency and/or reducing
company-wide environmental impact
Research and development innovation/improvement
International expansion
New collaborative tools and business processes utilizing Web 2.0
technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networking services, etc.
16%
13%
13%
9%
12%
14%
22%
18%
21%
23%
© 2010 Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2010.
This makes the timing and intent of EMC’s unified guarantee rather intriguing as much for what’s not included as for
what is. To be specific, the new guarantee is all about “out of the box” value, and it does not take into account the
incremental efficiency gains that will be the result of several features EMC is scheduled to make available this summer.
The features include:
19%
18%
25%
30%
24%
27%
31%
35%
Sub-LUN FAST: EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering that allows sub-LUN/volume automated, real-time
data migration and placement. This translates as the automated movement of data to the right place rather
than trying to employ either post-event reaction (which will be too late to have the economic benefit that
was desired) or pre-event prediction (which is impossible in dynamic environments). In most IT
environments, perhaps 90% of the user data is “cool” or “cold” and only 10% is “warm” or “hot”—FAST
makes tiering automated and simple. It can reduce overall costs by enabling customers to use more SATA
drives in production workloads.
47%
54%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
2009
(N=492)
2010
(N=515)

Company Brief: EMC Guarantees 20% Capacity Advantage for its Unified Storage Systems 4
FASTCache: The ability to flexibly use all or a percentage of a user’s EFD (Enterprise Flash Drive, EMC’s term
for SSD) capacity as an extended cache pool. Flash drives can, in other words, be employed—flexibly—as
either an extremely high performance “tier” of storage for a relatively limited capacity or as a tool to provide
a turbo-boost of performance across an entire storage system. The expectations for this capability are not
trivial; although still in formal testing, relatively small FASTCache usage is expected to be able to reduce
backend disk IO by over 60% in medium-to-large VMware View environments, while a medium-to-large
Oracle OLTP environment could reduce its storage footprint by 50% and double performance.
Compression: This will be a tool for primary data and it will be an ability that is new in terms of mainstream
use by a major storage vendor. An often overlooked function, data compression can significantly further
reduce storage capacity needs.
While the potential efficiency gains of these new features are themselves dramatic, they will be coupled with other
existing EMC capabilities, including Virtual (thin) Provisioning and deduplication (using Data Domain and Avamar).
Looked at in total, it is clear that EMC is driving efficiency as a core value for its mid-tier storage customers. Although
efficiency will be promoted, it will not be at the cost of effectiveness. For example, the use of FASTCache and Sub-LUN
FAST promises improved performance; this is especially useful for demanding and unpredictable environments,
exemplified by virtualized server operations. Combining greater efficiency with improved performance fits exactly with
what IT practitioners—squeezed as they are from all sides—both need and want.
None of the capabilities of these tools are calculated into—or demanded for—the 20% capacity guarantee. This leads to
two main realizations:
The Bigger Truth
Assuming that all the new functionality works as advertised (and there's no reason to believe otherwise),
then it all translates to even more efficiency (value) for users; and that EMC is priming for a bigger market
battle in the months to come.
Rather obviously—whether for new or extended EMC Unified storage users—this makes the current 20%
less capacity guarantee even more alluring because it's almost certainly going to be exceeded in practice.
EMC’s new guarantee can be viewed on two levels. Looked at simply for what it is, it is attractive (backed as it is by EMC)
and also very relevant to help address a common user need: reducing operational expenses. However, taken in
consideration with the efficiency themes and functions coming in July 2010, it is hard to see anything other than the
start of an all-out market battle around simplicity and economic value that will benefit users.
This new guarantee talks specifically about today’s “unified storage.” The larger EMC manifestation of unified storage is
EMC’s recently announced unified management system: Unisphere. As announced, Unisphere enables both current and
new EMC customers to manage block and file storage as one, and we would not be surprised to see object management
following reasonably soon. Given that the new 20% guarantee appears conservative in light of the new functions arriving
this summer, this all looks like the beginnings of a much broader market campaign.
Of course, EMC’s competition will not take this lying down. We can expect furious exchanges and challenges in terms of
which solution is best, but extensive vendor debates and offers around improved efficiency can ultimately only be good
for customers. EMC’s “20% less” move is almost certainly just the first salvo in a much larger engagement focused more
than ever on customer needs. This is, of course, going to make for an extremely interesting storage world over the next
year or two—guaranteed!
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