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

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)