A V-Max Moment

I spent time last week with the IT team responsible for a major university research program.  As a current EMC customer they were interested in how our plans and vision fit with their own. 

They have a good size IT operation in place and want to control costs gain efficiency and control overall IT growth. 

Not unusual. 

The new wrinkle is a major research program being planned that will double and then triple their IT demand in the next 18-24 months. 

Challenging.

They are also nearly out of energy and confined in space.

Predictable plot twist.

So, we talked about a bunch of efficiency improvements to consider.  The starter list: server virtualization, storage consolidation, tiering with Flash and SATA drives, archiving.

The extended list: de-duplication, application classification, consolidation and alignment, information management, proven practices and automation.

Of course the list goes on but the point wasn’t to cover them all.  More, it was to highlight that there are a good number of options - choices to be made.  That’s where experienced professional consulting services were very handy to help sort it out. 

They had a packed agenda but I noticed that the recently announced Symmetrix V-Max was not being covered.   So I offered an overview and they agreed.

We walked through the high level vision - Mr.. Tucci’s vision for the virtual data center.  We talked about our work with Cisco and VMware and how the private cloud looked less cloudy.  Then we talked about the new Virtual Matrix Architecture and the flexibility to start very small and grow very large – up in capacity, out in scale. 

Then came the V-Max moment. 

It was as if little cartoon light bulbs lit up all around the room.

They had the IT efficiency concepts already.  Then, as we linked those to the V-Max and Virtual Provisioning, and Virtual LUNs, and FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and non-disruptive capacity/performance expansion and VMware’s just announced Vsphere and Cisco’s Unified Networking …

They got it.

We had looked at the piece parts.  Now we were looking at the whole IT system – soon to be virtual environment.

The conversation started with V-Max as a product.  Now they saw it as an illustration of  a concept.  Take all that virtual stuff and start putting it together.  Take it to the private cloud.  And no reason not to start now.

Save some energy too. 

Made my day.

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