#102 – May Midrange Madness with Chris Mellor

This week Martin, Chris Evans and Chris Mellor discuss Dell EMC’s plans for merging the three current midrange storage platforms marketed by the company.  This is a follow-up to the article Chris recently posted on https://blockandfiles.com that discusses Project Trident.

There are a lot of moving parts to consider when merging storage platforms.  Customers have spent time and effort developing processes and scripting to automate common processes.  How will these be supported?  Will the new platform appear to take on the persona of the previous three?  Should customers (as Martin believes) be forced to make a clean break and throw away old scripts?

In the file and object space, the team think Islion will continue to have a prominent place in Dell EMC’s portfolio.  What about the high-end could Dell EMC acquire or build a high-performance scale-out file system?

The conversation turns next to acquisitive DDN, which has recently acquired Nexenta.  DDN also bought out the assets of Tintri.  Is DDN looking to move to the enterprise market?

Finally, the team consider HPE’s acquisition of Cray Inc.  This now gives HPE a range of storage platforms for HPC, but will the strategy turn out to be successful?

Elapsed Time: 00:31:54

Timeline

• 00:00:00 – Intros
• 00:01:00 – Dell EMC – a plethora of midrange storage arrays
• 00:02:20 – Merging will just create a new CLARiiON?
• 00:02:40 – What is the result of 3:1 merging?
• 00:03:49 – Pain-free migration, how does this work with scripts?
• 00:06:20 – Maybe vendors should be forced to dump old scripting
• 00:07:30 – Which platform will be the favoured one for Midrange.NEXT?
• 00:09:14 – Unity has the biggest user base – so will be the survivor?
• 00:11:20 – Which platforms are the most feature-rich?
• 00:12:30 – How should engineering teams be restructured?
• 00:13:57 – Does NetApp history show how not to merge platforms together?
• 00:16:00 – What is Trident?
• 00:18:40 – As a customer what assurances would you be asking your vendor for?
• 00:19:36 – Are other vendors looking to steal customers as part of the consolidation?
• 00:21:00 – Isilon provides scalable services for scale-out file requirements
• 00:23:12 – Do we have too many midrange storage vendors?  DDN acquiring?
• 00:25:19 – Chris is charmed by Tarkan! Or is it just storage CEOs?
• 00:27:17 – HPE buys Cray – what’s the reason behind this?
• 00:31:00 – Wrap Up….

Related Podcasts & Blogs

• #90 – Dell EMC’s Enterprise NVMe Strategy with Vince Westin
• #99 – Dell Technologies World 2019 in Review
• What Next for XtremIO?

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