Finding middle ground

CBR investigates EMC's approach to the midmarket and how the company is positing its products to fit the needs of medium sized enterprises.

It can be as difficult to determine what IT vendors mean by the midmarket. Conceptually, it must sit directly below enterprise and above SMB or SME, but there's the rub: some vendors see SMB as something just a little bigger than SoHo, while others include companies of up to 1,000 employees.

Of course, the M in SMB stands for medium-sized, so there is an argument that the midmarket actually IS the higher end of SMB. For the purposes of this article, however, we shall consider it as a separate group, located above SMB in the demographic pyramid of corporate entities.

While annual revenue might be a worthy criterion, there is a geographical dimension to that form of classification: a globally distributed multinational corporation can be classed with confidence in the enterprise segment, but some of what are called midmarket companies in the States have a top line greater than the GDP of a handful of small nations.

Adrian McDonald, VP and GM of EMC in the UK and Ireland, said the company's taxonomy for market segmentation is: at the high end the enterprise customers, below them corporate, then commercial, then SMB. The corporate and commercial, therefore, can be considered the midmarket in EMC parlance.

Storage: the way we were
It would have been no exaggeration, at the beginning of this decade, to say that EMC was taking its first steps beyond a decade-long position as an unashamedly high-end vendor. Meanwhile the SMB space was served by hard drives in servers, plus a bevy of vendors offering low-end tape or optical and magneto-optical technology for backup. The midmarket in those days was served by people like StorageWorks, then a Compaq division and now part of HP. Data General's Clariion storage unit had built a business in that segment on OEM relationships with the likes of Dell, till it was acquired, along with its server vendor parent, by EMC in 1999.

Much has changed since then. EMC has diversified its portfolio to become a multi-product, multi-segment player, not to mention becoming a major software vendor with the acquisitions of Legato (storage software), Documentum (document/content/records management), VMWare (server virtualization) and, most recently, RSA (security software). StorageWorks had a couple of tough years characterized by what might be termed "merger stasis," and LSI/Engenio filled the void left by Clariion as the provider of midrange storage for OEM customers.

After turning its sights on the SMB base in the last 3-4 years and building a channel to address that segment, EMC has begun to focus on the midmarket, recently launching a slew of products that are clearly designed to address that part of the overall market.

EMC's high-end beginnings
EMC became the largest dedicated storage vendor, i.e. one that didn't make servers and sell storage as an ancillary product, through the nineties by selling high-performance, big-ticket disk arrays to companies that didn't want to buy automatically from their server supplier. It started out attacking and winning share in the IBM mainframe user base, then moved on to open systems and disrupted the cosy "attach rate" syndrome of the remaining big Unix players.

Its acquisition of Data General was done not to get into the server business, but because DG had Clariion, which had become the tail wagging the dog, and the Clariion portfolio was very quickly positioned as the midmarket range at EMC. To make sure it sold enough of that range, in 2000 it partnered with Dell, with part of the production going out under the Dell/EMC brand, while EMC's direct sales force and other channel partners sold Clariion with the EMC logo only on it.

Symmetrix vs. Clariion; DMX vs. CX
The two product lines have continued until today, the high-end Symmetrix line having undergone an architectural update to become the Symmetrix DMX range, while the Clariion portfolio is now referred to as the CX line. More than name changes, the two lines have been through significant other developments, with the DMX line offering modularity, which the Symmetrix products never had. While in general terms DMX remains the high-end product and the CX is more for the midmarket, a newly launched low-end device in the DMX range clearly seeks to address the requirements of a demanding midmarket company too.

Dave Donatelli, executive VP of storage product operations, acknowledges that the enterprise/midmarket distinction between the two ranges has been partially blurred by some of the latest developments at the low end of DMX, but insists there is still clear differentiation. Both portfolios are now in their third iteration, and as he puts it, "over 600 drives, the DMX-3 is the least expensive storage you can buy, whereas under 600, CX-3 is less expensive."

The DMX's new low end: the 950
The latest addition to the DMX range, the DMX-3 950, reveals EMC's concern to lower the entry point for into this portfolio. Whereas the next smallest product in the range starts at 96 drives and scaled up to 2,400, its new little brother goes from 32 to 360 drives. At its maximum capacity, it can hold a respectable 180TB, while the list price of the lowest configuration is $250,000, putting it squarely in the corporate end of midmarket.

"The new range scales up and down," said Donatelli about the DMX portfolio. What is perhaps most telling in his remark about price-performance for the two ranges is what it reveals about EMC's strategy for the midmarket. DMX is actually more cost-effective over 600 drives, but the range now scales down as far as 32 drives, while the largest of the Clariion boxes, the CX 80, goes up to 480. In other words, as Donatelli himself put it, "overlap is offered."

Indeed, it is clear that in that Venn diagram intersection between 32 and 480, there will be two types of midmarket customer, or even two types of requirement within the same company. On the one hand, companies requiring the performance of high-end devices and prepared to pay a premium for it, and on the other, companies whose primary concern is cost-effective (i.e. cheaper) storage and ease of use, and does not need some of the more performant aspects of a high-end box.

CX3 gets 4GbFC with UltraScale
It is interesting that EMC chose to deliver 4Gb Fibre Channel (4GbFC) connectivity first on the CX family, which it did in May when it introduced its UltraScale architecture. Thus suggests the company sees the higher data rate being more important on that range, perhaps because it will be used as a first stage in backing up data from a DMX and so will need faster write times for greater backup efficiency.

In the latest round of announcements, the Clariion boxes also gained the ability not only to support Fibre Channel or iSCSI connectivity, which they had been doing since 2005, but also to mix the two in the same array, a capability achieved by adding eight iSCSI host ports to the four Fibre Channel ones on the box. And given that both ranges now support Fibre Channel, iSCSI and GbE connectivity, the potential for creating different tiers of storage within the same enclosure, let alone across a DMX and CX, offers some interesting permutations.

EMC was the first tier-one vendor to add the iSCSI interconnect to its midrange devices last year. It says sales of iSCSI Clariion arrays have already run into the tens of thousands since then, with the customers for these devices coming mainly from SMB. Now, with the addition of the ability to mix the two interconnects on the same device, it is predicting a take-up of iSCSI in the midmarket, the idea being that companies in that segment will be able to link what it calls "stranded" servers to a central storage facility via the lower-cost protocol, since Fibre Channel is prohibitively expensive and has distance limitation.

"Until now, customers who have wanted to mix and match iSCSI and Fibre Channel in the same array have had to make huge sacrifices in capacity utilization," said Donatelli. "The only way to overcome this inherent problem with filers was to buy more filers, creating a management nightmare. The beauty of EMC's UltraScale architecture is that customers can use all of the storage capacity they paid for without sacrificing performance."

Three customer segments
Regarding the strategy behind the latest DMX and CX announcements, McDonald said the company seeks to serve three distinct customer groups. "First there are enterprise customers with a full information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy, who require the DMX and CX as different tiers within their hierarchy," he began.

"Then there are low-end enterprise and high-end corporate customers, each with their own budgets and skill sets, who want to do ILM in one device and want it in a DMX. The 950 lets them to do a lot in a small box, thanks to increased disk capacities, as well as enabling a decentralized architecture and replication between different arrays for purposes of data warehousing, disaster recovery and compliance."

"Finally," he went on, "there are mainstream corporate and commercial customers, who tend to be dedicated CX users, for whom we're expanding the ILM possibilities, enabling easy expansion and giving them the possibility of doing SAN and NAS attachment in the same array."

Navisphere gets a QoS Manager
While the DMX remains the portfolio on which EMC delivers all the bells and whistles of enterprise storage management for the most demanding customers, as it moves to cover the midmarket with most options from both the DMX and CX ranges, it is also adding ever more sophisticated features into the latter portfolio. The latest slew of announcements, for instance, included a new version of the Navisphere management software for Clariion, with the introduction of a Navisphere Quality of Service Manager.

Of course, the DMX range has had its Optimizer QoS software for some time, but now the same kind of functionality, albeit in a simpler form, is coming to the CX. Navisphere QoS Manager enables application- and time-specific optimization of the performance of the storage infrastructure such that, for instance, system resources can be allocated for the best response to the requirements of, say, an Exchange Server during the day when it is running in a multi-app environment, then programmed to change at night, when the Exchange environment is scheduled to get its daily backup.

Finally, and again thinking midmarket, EMC has added a Navisphere Task Bar to the platform, accessible via a browser and designed to enable wizard-based management without impact on the running of other apps on the network.

Celerra NAS
Of course, another reason for taking 4GbFC to the CX3 range is that it underpins both the other announcements, since the Clariion boxes are the disk that can be attached to the company's network-attached storage (NAC) headers, as well as providing the HDD component of the company's virtual tape library offerings.

The CX portfolio provides the disk back-end of EMC's NS series of integrated network attached storage (NAS) offerings, i.e. those that comprise both the disks and a NAS header. The faster interconnect between disk and header (which is serving files over IP at the front end) enables more efficient file serving.

Thus it was that, in this round of announcements, the filers moved from the previous generation CX to the CX3 platform, the UltraScale technology becoming automatically available on the NS series.

Virtual tape libraries
The same goes for EMC's range of virtual tape libraries (VTLs), which are disk enclosures that emulate tape, such that backup software can write to them in tape format, yet at far greater speed than when writing to physical tape. Again, the CX family forms the basis of what the company calls the EMC Disk Library portfolio, which has also just moved onto the CX3 platform and thus enjoys the speed of UltraScale.

Dell grows its solutions offering
Josh Claman, VP and GM of Dell UK, said he detects a change in the storage requirement of his company's mid-tier customers. "They're requiring point-in-time copies, scalability and backup and recovery, and while we've always moved a lot of product for EMC, now we're also getting involved in solutions work, with more consultancy," he explained. "We're getting involved in projects that involve Dell/EMC products [i.e. the CX range] but also EMC-only ones [i.e. DMX]."

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