Before Flattery - EMC's Magic 8 Ball

NetApp is an innovator.  EMC is an imitator.  Look no further than: Storage Simplicity, NAS is mission-critical, SATA in the Enterprise, Advanced D2D Backup & Recovery, Unified Storage, iSCSI, Oracle & VMware over NFS, Thin Provisioning / Rapid Cloning ... and soon end-to-end dedupe I predict.  Then again an integrated product line with ultra-fast RAID that's also recognized as the most space-efficient (by key ISV's) may be beyond even EMC's own imagination.  So apparently not everything can be imitated :)

But did you ever wonder what happens in the uncomfortably long (for EMC) timeframe between NetApp innovation and EMC imitation?  That's the topic we'll Expose today.

The "Ministry of Misinformation" has become Predictable

Regardless of the positioning NetApp brings to market, leading networked storage anthropologists have observed EMC will pull from a finite list of canned responses, with some slight context-specific customization as required.  In fact, the depth of EMC's responses is not much more insightful than a Magic 8 Ball - Hopkinton Edition!  To wit:

"Customers are buying NetApp in the Enterprise", report EMC sales teams

• Do you remember the old "NAS is too slow for databases" line?
  
• How about "Ethernet networks are too collision-prone and unreliable"?
  
• Or what about the comforting "Good old fashioned LUN's"?

 

Today in full catch-up mode, EMC is boasting NAS sales so good, they are (ahem) "Selling Out".  Read into that statement what you will :)

Of course modern performance data, expert analyst opinion and prestigious customer awards continue to stymie EMC's Magic 8 Ball in this regard.  Undaunted, they push ahead.

Surely EMC can find some familiar old stomping grounds to try and re-establish some order in an increasingly chaotic world they no longer seem to dictate?

"What about our old standby, SAN Dominance?", asks EMC Marketing

WAFL Fragmentation, Capacity Overhead &
Emulated LUN's

Based on the continued popularity of this old FUD from EMC and wannabe imitators HP, Dell/EqualLogic,
HDS, 3Par, Compellent, BlueArc and others - it actually seems as if this one never gets old.  In fact, EMC is emboldened enough to have a Senior VP embarrass himself by featuring it as part of a major product launch today.

Much like Elvis Sightings or the Moon-Landing Hoax, conspiracy theorists will continue to believe what they want, ignoring all the consistent scientific evidence and objective expert technical opinions plus objective expert industry opinions to the contrary.

"NetApp continually announces new capabilities we don't have.  They also use objective data to refute our subjective claims.  How should we position?", asks EMC.

Perhaps my favorite illustration is this article where EMC's Chuck Hollis admits to "stupid" amounts of internal testing they conduct on competitive gear, yet dodges why that money is not invested in public benchmarking via broad industry-wide consortiums based on complete & utter transparency and accountability.

The icing on the cake though is Chuck's claim in this article that "There's an ethical line here and EMC will not cross it".
Wow, I guess those venomous anti-NetApp "technotes" with EMC's logo mean that EMC is now a victim of identity theft, and someone else has fraudulently published material in EMC's name?  In fact I'm sure specifically hiring a few former NetApp technicians with an axe to grind in order to produce those lop-sided reports had nothing to do with it either?

But wait - there's more!

Despite tens of thousands of production deployments on NetApp, apparently Thin Provisioning wasn't safe until EMC renamed it (to Virtual Provisioning) and began to offer it to their well-heeled Symmetrix DMX customers earlier this year, then pre-announced today for the CLARiiON working class later this year.  BTW - Celerra's implementation doesn't count here.  See NAS & Emulated LUN sections above for EMC's own reasons why.

But the Magic 8 Ball doesn't always give answers you want

So EMC is back to old reliable stalling tactics based on speculative FUD:

1. It's hard! 
2. It's breaks things! 
3. It's unsupportable! 
4. It must have overhead with all the value-add! 
5. Is there really any measurable savings? 
6. It's an experiment, not ready for prime-time.

Without giving this EMC misinformation too much time of day, let me see if I can help gullible readers quickly clear through the FUD:

1. It's no different than installing a new array, or performing a routine forklift upgrade of a legacy frame array (i.e. DMX-1 to DMX-2 to DMX-3 to DMX-4, etc...).  Fortunately, NetApp makes it easy! 
2. Yes proprietary legacy software may not behave as before.  Fortunately industry trends are replacing unnecessary proprietary lock-in where it's not required.  Of course EMC could choose to respond to customer demand for more open heterogeneous hardware support in their software, but that would destroy the walled garden business model they prefer.  Ever try connecting a Celerra "gateway" to anything other than an EMC SAN array?
3. Back to the walled garden business model, this is an artificial limitation imposed by EMC, not related to any technical limitation or lack of investment on NetApp's part.  Hint, hint - if you make your next EMC P.O. conditional on this, you'll find them suddenly very accommodating regarding V-Series support :)
4. See WAFL FUD section above. 
5. Why didn't we think of that?  Oh yeah, we did. 
6. Sorry Chuck, this is not your father's NetApp.  As we approach $4B in annual revenue, the industry recognizes we have big customers deploying NetApp innovation for serious projects with real savings.  And we support them with unmatched professionalism.

Finally, EMC's myopic reaction to our announcement displays a surprising lack of vision.  Not only can NetApp provide our unique End-End Deduplication, Accelerated Performance, proven Thin Provisioning, Advanced Cloning and of course industry-leading snapshots to EMC SAN arrays; but via the magic of truly unified storage we can offer all of that via iSCSI and NAS protocols as well!  All on the same virtualizing controller platform for truly unified storage management of EMC's continuously expanding slate of storage offerings.

There's actually nothing magic about an 8 ball at all

It's been routinely deconstructed all over the web.  Much like Heath Ledger's acclaimed Joker promises Gotham a "better class of criminal", perhaps this blog post will motivate EMC to raise their game and offer a better class of competitive positioning?

Or maybe that's just being naive.  After all as the Joker also says "... I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one ..."

Does EMC even remember anymore how to position competitively with unvarnished facts instead of rhetoric and hyperbole?

Comments

[Geert]

Chuck didn't wait long to prove your exact points...

http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/08/cx4-announcemen.html

"...*real* FC...", pff.

[Val Bercovici]

Hah! What's even more amazing is that Chuck, Zilla, Anarchist, Oracle Guy, Backup Dude and others at the EMC Ministry of Misinformation will continue to do it, long after they've forgotten about this exposure.

It's subliminal with them to ignore facts when they're inconvenient, so I (almost) can't even blame them. Almost :)

[Alex McDonald]

8 ball? Hard ball, more like!

Really, the time has come to call out EMC on this stuff. Watching them twist and turn is over; let's call them out on it.

More of Chuck's flip-flops at:
http://blogs.netapp.com/shadeofblue/2008/09/the-vicar-of-br.html