Chris Evans, The Storage Architect, declared victory over SANScreen with EMC’s latest offering.
And it’s the usual set of claims about how EMC, the company that brought us ECC, is better at delivering management tools and products.
Huh?
Management software is about delivering simplicity to the customer, and EMC has a lot of value in their infrastructure and their offerings, but the value of simplicity is not what comes to mind.
EMC infrastructure continues to suffer from a proliferation of incompatible architectures that provide point value in the data center.
Their management tools seems to be following that trend. They have multiple management consoles for management products. Even their unified storage architecture has no consistent way to manage replication or storage provisioning.
Their answer to the management complexity they create with their infrastructure is to create another management infrastructure.
But enough about His Excellency Mr. Complexity
What really surprised me was the outrageous claim that SANscreen has made very little progress in the years since the acquisition. He derisively cited the progress as meaningless reporting.
Earlier this year I wrote about the recent SANscreen 5.0 release.
Just to remind folks, SANscreen 5.0 added
- iSCSI support
- Storage tiering
And what I didn’t talk about then was the support we added for VMware, called VMInsight.
So if managing your SAN and iSAN and managing your space adds no value, well then I don’t know what does.
And yes, I know there is a collection of EMC management tools….
I have no doubt that through a combination of ControlCenter and SAN Configuration Advisor, and who knows what else, there is an overlapping value proposition that you could construct using EMC products.
But that’s the wrong way to go.
In management software, fewer products is better than more products. The fewer products, the fewer workflows, the less training, the simpler operations are.
And SANscreen not only delivers compelling value but it also delivers the value for heterogeneous infrastructure and in one place.
