EMC today announces a product that's already sort of announced. Now we have the details.
EMC has a unique offering here. It builds upon the story line of automation that places data in the most appropriate place at the right time. And it gives customers extraordinary performance with proven, array-based data protection.
The official product name is EMC VFCache. (See emc.com for product details.)
Last year at EMC World Pat Gelsinger put out a teaser on "Project Lightning". Essentially a new product family that brings flash storage and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) into the server.
What this means is that customers have a unique, secure and protected way - VFCache - for handling the data that requires the best performance. If data had a temperature, "the hottest of the hot data" would be right inside the server with the application - VFCache. That means the most IOPs and the shortest response time. Inside the storage array, using FAST, data will cascade according to its utilizaton and will move automatically as its temperature changes. So VFCache for the hot hot. Flash drives in the array for hot. Fibre Channel for cool. SAS / SATA drives for cold.
Performance gets a boost where it's needed and at a reasonable cost.
Partners will like this too...
EMC has thousands of resellers and most of them sell servers. The value add for most is in providing integrated soluitons with some unique differentiation. VFCache is a great candidate for that spotlight.
Think about on-line transactional business, or Finance or Government. Think about applicaitons like data-bases, OLTP, email or web applicaitons.
For partners this should be an easy way to get incremental business, to increase the deal size. Sell a VMAXe for example. Then sell-up with VFCache for a high-performance environment. Extending flash with EMC FAST into the server environment not only increases performanance, it protects customer data with all of the functionality of the array. That increases account stickiness and broadens services opportunities as well.
I'm pretty sure that partners will like that.
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