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Tag: emc

  • Facebook, Google and Amazon reportedly outsourcing new storage product orders to Taiwan-based ODMs

    Inexpensive data storage boxes from Taiwan are being picked up in lieu of storage arrays from Dell, EMC, HP and NetApp by Facebook and other vast data-centre operators such as Google and Amazon.

    Supply chain insiders say that the juggernaut that is Facebook is about to buy bargain storage kits from original design manufacturers, or ODMs, based in Taiwan. Original design manufacturers work with customer specifications to design and produce hardware. Both Quanta Computer and Wistron will be likely bidders for Facebook's supply contracts.

    Facebook looks to save a small fortune by using arrays defined by its Open Compute Project standard and running its own software. It's quite possible this may not even occur, as reports from Far East supply chain sources tend to be a little questionable, but the information is interesting nonetheless.

    Using ODMs for storage gear doesn't come as a big surprise; Facebook is merely following a trend. According to Digitimes, Google buys all its servers from ODMs and Amazon follows suit about 30 per cent of the time.

    Sales of standardised hardware via distribution channel partners to the West and beyond could start happening anytime. Amazon, Baidu and other cloud giants are likely to expand their services into the cloud; businesses are purchasing fewer storage arrays because of the cloud, so it's no surprise that Amazon, Baidu and others are making forays into this area.

    DEY Storage, a startup company, claims it can follow the trend started by Amazon, Facebook and Google. The company claims they can unbundle "storage management from the physical layer to provide customers with a storage system which is massively scalable and designed to align and integrate with their services-based infrastructures".

    The current crop of servers, storage and network switch vendors may have to look to Taiwan for a new model if they want to continue to be successful.

  • IDC: EMC Led The Overall Storage Software Market in Q3

    According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced another decline in year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2009 with revenues of $2.87 billion, representing –7.9% growth over the same quarter one year ago, but a 1.2% growth from the previous quarter.

    IDC report shows EMC led the overall market with 23.4% revenue share in the third quarter of 2009. Symantec held onto the second position with 17.8% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 12.2% revenue share.

    NetApp finished in the fourth position with 7.6% revenue share while CA rounded out the top 5 with 3.9 revenue share.

    For the second quarter in a row, only two of the top 5 vendors displayed a positive growth over the previous quarter. EMC and IBM displayed positive growth rates of 5.7%, and 6.9% respectively, while Symantec, NetApp, and CA each had negative growth rates from the previous quarter of –2.1%, –8.9%, and –3% respectively.

    “Two out of the top three vendors in the data protection and recovery market grew sequentially (IBM and EMC) while the leader Symantec declined at 1.2%,” said Michael Margossian, research analyst, Storage Software at IDC.

    Symantec is still the market leader with 31.1% market share, and IBM and EMC having 14.1% and 12.8% market share respectively.

    EMC regain the top spot in the replication market, with 10.7% growth over 2Q09, while NetApp declined 10.1%.

    “The storage software market was barely able to maintain a positive sequential growth rate in the third quarter of 2009,” concluded Margossian.

  • EMC Completes Acquisition of Data Domain


    EMC Corporation has finally overcome rival NetApp and succeeded with its bid to buy data deduplication leader Data Domain at a price of USD $2.1 billion.

    The acceptance of the final offer comes after a six-week bidding war and will raise questions about whether EMC overpaid for Data Domain – and what NetApp will do now.

    EMC’s final offer of USD $33.50 per share for Data Domain is a lofty figure compared to the $18 its stock was trading for before NetApp’s first bid May 20.

    NetApp went on to offer of USD $25 per share before increasing that to USD $30 after EMC joined the fray.

    While EMC could be accused of overpaying, deduplication is viewed as a growing segment of the storage market and Data Domain offers some very good technology.

    For NetApp there do appear to be other potential acquisition targets to bring it into the data deduplication/backup space, including CommVault, FalconStor, Quantum and Sepaton.

    The challenge facing EMC now is to decide how to bring Data Domain to market.

    With businesses storing 50 per cent more data each year, according to some market research estimates, EMC is betting the acquisition will pay off.

    Joe Tucci, EMC chairman, president and CEO, said: "This is a compelling acquisition from both a strategic and financial standpoint.

    "We look forward to bringing Data Domain together with EMC to form a powerful force in next-generation disk-based backup and archive."

  • EMC Extends Data Domain Offer


    EMC Corporation has extended its all-cash tender offer to purchase all outstanding shares of Data Domain common stock for USD $30 per share.

    The move is to provide additional time to satisfy closing conditions, the offering period now expires at 12:00 midnight EDT on July 10, 2009.

    The initial offering period, which began on June 2, 2009, was previously scheduled to expire at 12:00 midnight EDT on June 29, 2009.

    Data Domain is the object of a bidding war between EMC and NetApp.

    It is unclear what EMC hopes to achieve by the extension, since Data Domain already rejected the offer on June 15 and said EMC’s offer is not in the best interest of its shareholders.

    It prefers a bid from NetApp.

    In May, NetApp announced that it had agreed to buy Data Domain for USD $25 per share in cash and stock, or about USD $1.5 billion.

  • INSIGHT: External IT's Joseph Stedler on the Advantages of Storage Virtualization in Private Clouds


    DataCore Software has announced that hosted IT-as-a-service company External IT has standardized on its SANsymphony storage virtualization software to serve as their storage area network (SAN).

    With VMware virtual servers, Citrix XenApp and DataCore storage virtualization, it allows External IT to deliver a complete virtualization infrastructure.

    Joseph Stedler, senior engineer and Dallas data center manager, External IT, said this is in the form of private computing "clouds", tailored individually to a specific client’s needs.

    He said he had worked with traditional SANs for eight years and has had firsthand experience with every major hardware SAN – including EMC, HP and NetApp.

    "There are various, major drawbacks to hardware SANs. One is the fact that there is a single point of failure at the disk level," he said.

    "This is particularly the case when doing, for example, firmware upgrades – on the controllers, on the disks, on the shelves – whereby you have to take the SAN down to perform that task.

    "The second most irksome characteristic of hardware SANs is their cost. These EMC SANs, these HP EVAs are inherently expensive, particularly during upgrade time."

    Stedler said there are capabilities that DataCore brings to the table that he "absolutely loves".

    "The concept of having two SANs as your one SAN environment is just elegantly simple," he said. "You have an ‘A’ side and a ‘B’ side."

    Stedler said the beauty of this is that if you need to do hardware maintenance or firmware upgrades, an administrator can actually take down half of the SAN and still have the other half serving production traffic – completely uninterrupted.

    "The second, major benefit of DataCore for External IT has to do with performance," he said.

    "With DataCore, you will experience enormous performance gains. The performance that DataCore delivers is nothing short of awesome."

    Other benefits that make up the "DataCore Difference" for External IT include Seamless Maintenance, Disaster Recovery (through asynchronous replication) and the Flexibility to create your own SANs.

  • IDC Reports Storage Software Sales Decline


    Storage software revenue has experienced its first quarterly year-over-year decline in more than five years, according to IDC.

    The analysts’ Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker showed that the device management, replication and infrastructure categories had the biggest declines.

    Symantec was the only vendor to grow revenue year-over-year, increasing 2.5 per cent. Hewlett-Packard’s 21.5 per cent drop was the biggest fall, while market leader EMC slipped 14.5 per cent.

    Michael Margossian, research analyst, storage software at IDC, said the combination of the normally slow first quarter for most companies with the continued economic climate was displayed in the first quarter’s results.

    "A majority of companies displayed either negative or very low year-over-year growth," he said.

  • NetApp Awaits EMC Response to Data Domain Bid


    The bidding war for Data Domain stepped up this week after NetApp raised the stakes with rival EMC by making a new cash and stock offer of USD $1.9 billion.

    It came two days after EMC’s offer of USD $30 per share in a deal worth about USD $1.8 billion – around 20 per cent over the original USD $1.5 billion offered LINK last month by NetApp.

    Data Domain, a market leader in data deduplication technology, manufactures a series of storage appliances that tightly integrates its dedupe technology with dedicated storage capacity.

    It also offers software for data replication and virtual tape libraries.

    Both EMC and NetApp currently offer data dedupe technology.

    The increased offer from NetApp means that, if accepted, its offer would use up almost all it’s US cash balance of USD $1.26 billion.

    However, EMC is widely expected to counter with an all-cash offer.

  • EMC Unveils Virtual Data Centre With High End Storage


    EMC Symmetric VMax is the latest breakthrough technology from EMC. It provides for a virtual data center with high end storage and scales up to 2 PB of usable protected capacity, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    Unlike alternate arrays, it equips its customers with an ability to consolidate workloads with a comparatively small footprint.

    These systems will be available immediately.

    Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman, President and CEO said: "The shift from physical to virtual computing is being driven by efficiency gains too compelling to ignore.

    "Virtualization’s ability to maximize resources and automate complex and repetitive manual tasks is overtaking the server world and is now happening in the storage world.

    "EMC is leading the way with the biggest breakthrough in new high-end storage design in nearly two decades, enabling storage customers to deploy a flexible, dynamic, energy-efficient information infrastructure and get the maximum value for their investment."

    The new architecture can be deployed with flash, Fibre channel and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives.
    Virtualized and physical servers are supported including open systems, mainframes and system hosts.

    The Virtual Logical unit number (LUN) technology moves data to the right tiers and redundant array of independent disks (RAID) types at the right time.

    Virtual provisioning efficiently allocates, grows and reclaims storage.

    The Extended distance protection replicates data over distances and achieves zero data loss protection.

    Information centric security systems with advanced RSA security technology have been built in to keep the data safe; reduce risk and improve compliance. The high end storage array uses multi core processors to lower power costs and IOPS per dollar.

  • Storage Market Slows, Modest Growth Forecast


    Well, it was only a matter of time. The data storage market has slowed down – and much more than anticipated, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    IDC revealed last week that global external disk storage systems’ factory revenues dropped by a half per cent in the fourth quarter.
    This is the first quarterly drop for data storage in more than 5 years.

    According to IDC, EMC, HP, Dell and Hitachi did grow a little in the last quarter, as expected.

    However, IBM, NetApp and Sun Microsystems all posted year-over-year sales declines.

    In the 4th quarter, external system revenues dropped slightly to USD $5.3 billion, while the total disk storage system market dropped 5.9 per cent to USD $7.3 billion chiefly due to limitations in server system sales.

    The other big decline was seen in the total disc storage system capacity, which peaked at 2,460 petabytes, a growth of only 27.3 per cent, but this was down by 50 per cent compared to the growth rate in the past.

    Natalya Yezkhova, IDC research manager for storage systems, said: "Because of the global economic crisis, the last quarter of 2008 was tough for the disk storage systems market, resulting in a market decline from the same quarter last year."

    She said that high-end storage sales were upset by a chill in the end-user expenditures and longer acquisition cycles.

    But some low-end and midrange storage sectors have continued to sale well, "as end users broadened their search for storage solutions in these lower-cost segments to satisfy their increasing storage needs while optimizing investments in storage infrastructure."

    EMC continues to hold the leadership with its external systems market share lead of nearly 23.3 per cent of revenue in the fourth quarter, followed by IBM and HP, with 15.7 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.

    Dell did not fare well and ended the quarter in the fourth position with a 9.3 per cent share.

    Hitachi and NetApp followed with 7 per cent growth, while Sun had 5.2 per cent.

    In the Open SAN market, which only grew 2.2 per cent, EMC was again in the lead with 24.2 per cent of the market.

    IBM followed next with 16.5 per cent.

    The NAS market has grown steadily and recorded a 8.6 per cent rise.

    Again, EMC led the pack with 43.8 per cent, followed by NetApp at 24.1 per cent.

    The sum network disk storage market (NAS combined with Open SAN) grew a modest 3.6 pe cent to USD $4.1 billion in revenues.

    EMC again claimed a 28.6 per cent revenue share, followed by IBM at 14.5 per cent.

    So what are the expectations for the rest of 2009?

    Enterprise Strategy Group and IDC both speculate a modest growth of 2-3 per cent for both the data storage industry overall IT spending.

    In an industry, which has always seen green, adjustment to single digit profits may not sit well for many people.

  • EMC Being Investigated by the Feds


    The Federal government has just announced in a statement that Data Storage giant, EMC is being investigated over its pricing and improper contract practices.

    EMC revealed in its annual report with the SEC several days ago that the US justice Department had filed a lawsuit against the company, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    According to the Justice Department press release, the lawsuit accuses EMC of failing to disclose its commercial pricing practices during negotiation of its General Services Administration (GSA) contracts.

    It also says EMC provided improper payments and other things of value to Systems Integrators and other Alliance Partners on contracts with government agencies.

    The lawsuit alleges that EMC tendered false claims for hardware and services on “numerous government contracts from the late 90s to the present”.

    It is believed that the lawsuit is based on insider information as the suit was filed in US District Court in Little Rock, Ark under the Whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act.

    Among other allegations in the lawsuit are that EMC, "made payments of money and other things of value (alliance benefits) to a number of systems integration consultants and other alliance partners with whom it had alliance relationships".

    The Justice Department further states "that these alliance relationships and the resulting alliance benefits paid by EMC amount to kickbacks and undisclosed conflict of interest relationships".

    The government press release also declares that EMC has been charged with making false statements to the General Accounting Service about its profit-making pricing customs to collect better proceeds on contracts, "thereby overcharging federal agencies purchasing EMC products and services".

    The report filed by EMC to the SEC mentions that the Justice Department is scrutinizing the company’s fee planning with systems integrators and other associates in federal government dealings.

    It is also looking at the company’s "compliance with the terms and conditions of certain agreements pursuant to which we sold products and services to the federal government, including potential violations of the False Claims Act".

    The investigation partly covers a previous audit by the GSA "concerning our recordkeeping and pricing practices under a schedule agreement we entered into with GSA in November 1999, which, following several extensions, expired in June 2007".

    To date, EMC says it has worked together with the inquiry and assessment and engaged in discussions aimed at resolving this matter without any admission or finding of liability on the part of EMC.

    "We believe that we have meritorious factual and legal defenses to the allegations raised and, if the matter is not resolved and proceeds to litigation, we intend to defend vigorously," the company said.

    "If the matter proceeds to litigation, possible sanctions include an award of damages, including treble damages, fines, penalties and other sanctions, including suspension or debarment from sales to the federal government."

    To keep things in perspective, EMC is not the first IT Corporation to face such allegations. Just a year ago IBM did clear up similar charges with a $ 3 million fine. Other companies that have gone through the same process include Accenture, HP and Sun Microsystems.

    StorageIO Group founder and senior analyst Greg Schulz speculates if the new Administration is just getting started.

    "If that’s the case, one has to wonder who’s next, and how big the boiler will be when the government finally gets around to the really big fish," he said.