EMC
- The Enterprise Storage Company
E-business has created soaring storage volume increases, with
up to 100% Compound Annual Growth (CAGR) widely reported. 'Captive', server
vendor-provided, direct attached storage was widely replaced in the 1990s
with independent enterprise storage systems. These offered advanced storage
management software and functionality, with support for multiple platforms.
One company, EMC Corporation, pioneered this change, and became the leading
provider of enterprise storage systems with its Symmetrix systems, first
on IBM mainframes, then on RISC UNIX and now on Windows/Intel enterprise
systems. EMC Corporation today fairly describes itself as the world leader
in information storage systems, software, networks, and services, providing
"the information infrastructure for a connected world." With near $9 billion
revenues, 32% growth, 23,400 employees, and profits of almost $1.8 billion
last year, EMC is widely regarded as one of the strong leaders of the
New Era e-Infrastructure, focused exclusively on storage systems. Often
thought of as a storage hardware company, in fact, much of the advanced
functionality that made EMC systems a de-facto enterprise standard derives
from its advanced storage management software products, which now attract
50% of EMC's R& D. Software revenues actually grew 72% last year! In recent
years, EMC has opened up its APIs to the industry, and invests heavily
in partnerships, interoperability laboratories, and testing, to ensure
its storage systems work with all major server and operating systems.
EMC claims to delivers a flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure - which
it terms an 'e-Infostructure' - from which businesses can change and grow,
creating competitive advantage in an environment where the rules are constantly
changing and the pace always quickens. EMC says that an e-Infostructure
enables information convergence: the bringing together of all business
information, regardless of source, for value throughout the enterprise.
By creating a single, unified view of all user information resources,
EMC claims that users will foster revenue creation, add operating efficiencies,
and drive their business forward faster.
Comment
There is no doubt that enterprise storage systems, Storage Area Networks
(SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems are a core part of today's
e-business infrastructure, and EMC is undoubtedly the acknowledged leader
in this key area. With its extensive mainframe data centre background,
EMC is also very familiar with meeting the tough storage management demands
of mission-critical enterprise systems, and now extra-enterprise e-business
systems. The company continues to drive-up storage densities (now over
200 terabytes in a single system), and drive-down total cost of ownership,
giving a beneficial curve of user value in this critical segment. Where
the storage costs of new e-business infrastructures often exceed those
of servers several-fold, this curve has a favourable impact on total infrastructure
costs.