My editor at ESJ.com found this in his spam folder today and sent it to me to check its authenticity. I confirmed with Steve Zivanic, VP of Marketing at Nirvanix, that it originated with him. Interesting factoids about EMC Atmos.
FYI, what EMC failed to tell you this morning regarding its latest Atmos claims:
- EMC still views storage as a product at a time when customers are viewing storage as a service. When it’s a storage product, the risk is all on the buyer. When it’s a service, the risk is all on the seller. Atmos is still a product customers have to buy and manage and operate and maintain–versus a cloud service they can simply access as required.
- Companies are shifting to a usage-based pricing model for storage consumption. In this regard, EMC still has no answer to Amazon, Nirvanix, Google or Azure.
- EMC talks private clouds, but requires millions of dollars in up-front fees to build customers a private cloud that customers still have to manage and maintain. Customers such as Cerner, USC and a $40B financial services company have passed on EMC’s approach and instead shifted to multi-petabyte private clouds from Nirvanix that are fully managed services with usage-based pricing.
- EMC talks hybrid clouds, but has no public cloud of its own and therefore cannot consistently enforce SLAs and SLOs–as well as data security–between two completely unrelated clouds.
- With Atmos, EMC is forcing customers to still undergo technology refreshes from one generation to the next. This is no different than what EMC practices with its Symmetrix VMax and CLARiiON hardware lines. Cloud means no more maintenance, no more data migrations, no more product EOLs to deal with. EMC is not selling a cloud, they are still selling a box.
- Did you know that Atmos nodes all have to be at the same exact code level in order to replicate data? If attempting to federate an Atmos private cloud with an external service provider using Atmos, such as AT&T, this becomes significantly complex to manage operationally. If an external provider decides to upgrade their Atmos node, you have to upgrade yours as well in order to keep it replicating. If you want to upgrade, you must wait for your provider to upgrade first. How would a customer attempt to upgrade multiple nodes at petabyte-scale across several locations? These are operational challenges that Nirvanix eliminates with a services-based approach. Atmos’ deficiencies are equivalent to one iPhone user not being able to contact another iPhone user because they were each running different versions of iOS.
- EMC maintains that it is an “arms dealer” to the cloud storage service providers. A small-scale arms dealer, yes. Not an arms dealer to industry heavyweights such as Amazon, Google and Azure or enterprise cloud storage specialists like Nirvanix. Companies such as these have yet to implement EMC Atmos for their public cloud infrastructures. Spending millions on costly cloud infrastructure is the direct inverse of the original intent of a highly scalable, cost-effective cloud services business model.
- Cloud services represent a conundrum for EMC; if they embrace a usage-based pricing model, they collapse their rich hardware margins. Which is why they prefer to sell more boxes emblazoned with cloud labels.
- The whole premise of cloud is that it was intended to be accessed over a network connection and deployed as a service. Where’s the HTTP address for the EMC Atmos cloud?
- Net/Net: EMC is still stuck in the old paradigm. Once a customer uploads their data to the cloud, it’s the last data migration they’ll ever do. That’s the new paradigm that EMC refuses to fundamentally embrace. It doesn’t matter how much “faster” Atmos is, EMC is still fighting the disruptive change that cloud storage represents.
Best regards,
Steve Zivanic
VP, Marketing
Nirvanix | The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Storage
Let the Cloud Wars begin!
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