Enterprise Computing: COPAN, EMC/VMware & STEC

By On 11 March, 2010 · 4 Comments · In Featured, GestaltIT

Over the last week there have been a few stories catching my eye.  Here’s a brief paragraph on them.

SGI Acquires COPAN Systems

In fact to be more precise, SGI have acquired some of the assets of COPAN and left the liabilities behind for a mere $2 million in cash (press release).  The demise of COPAN raises two potential questions; is spin-down a dead technology or were COPAN in a market that wasn’t able to understand their technology?  I have to admit it took me a while to get what COPAN were offering.  In fact I had a presentation of their technology by the UK team a couple of years ago in which I experienced that “light bulb” moment.  However times change.  Ask yourself the following questions:

  • How expensive was COPAN compared to a standard modular solution?
  • What savings could I actually achieve in a COPAN solution?
  • Which other vendors now offer spin-down in their products?

At the end of the day, the majority of an array is disk drives, which cost the same, whoever you purchase them from.  Savings from suspending power usage are not that great; powering down a single drive may only save $10-15/year, hardly a massive saving.  With other vendors also offering spin down in their products, it was only a matter of time before COPAN hit a wall.  I evaluated the product for deployment at a client.  My major issue with the offering was the sheer weight of it.  This factor alone would have made impractical for many data centres.

EMC Sells IP to VMware

It’s a bit like borrowing something from your parents; EMC are selling some of their software IP to VMware for the princely sum of $200 million (press release).  The products being transferred relate to server  and application management. Does this mean that owning the Hypervisor isn’t enough to beat the competition?  I expect it does.  Where’s the money to be made in selling a hypvervisor that in a few years will have to be given away for free?  Hyper-V may not be competitive today, but a free product definitely beats a one that has to be paid for, even if the features aren’t quite as good.  So the future is selling add-on value, simplification or tie-in.  Maybe that’s the reason behind the parental selloff.

STEC Shares Get Punished

STEC shares have yet again taken a battering after they missed earnings target by a mile (Barrons Report).  The press report on the link makes an interesting comment claiming EMC may have effectively stopped ordering SSDs.

I’ve personally always thought that SSDs were overhyped.  I never believed they would be adopted as quickly as EMC predicted (or more accurately would have wished).  Have a look at Beth Pariseau’s article from this time last year (TechTarget article).  At the time Tucci claimed EMC were selling “every SSD they could get their hands on”.  We can only assume that has changed.  What a difference a year makes.

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  • http://blog.insanegeeks.com InsaneGeek

    I’d say that since the VMWare ESXi hypervisor is free that your question is already answered. For all intensive purposes at a hypervisor ESX and free ESXi are the exact same thing. Aside from the obvious pure appliance ESXi vs ESX OS you can install agents, etc into. ESXi is ESX without a license for certain additional features, I run it at home free of charge already. I think the vendors are already on the same page that the hypervisor is free, and that they are going to charge for “value add”. To go from ESXi free to the same functionality of ESX Enterprise Plus just install a license (some people even say that ESXi is faster than ESX because there isn’t a console guest running).

    I think the exchange of software from EMC to VMWare is this: VMWare has a long history of being agnostic (and having a bunch of general hype around it) that probably opens quite a few more doors to other vendor “innards”. If EMC was the one asking for some 3rd party low level API’s there’s probably quite a few companies that would just slam the door shut, either from a competition or from a “we just don’t care what a storage company has to offer”. If EMC asks NetApp for low-level API access, they’d probably tell them to pound sand; if VMWare asks NetApp for low-level API access they’ll probably have 50 developers flown in that afternoon. Other vendors want to work with VMWare… but I don’t think EMC in general has the same “draw”.

    Also VMWare has simply made more management tools that people want to use. While I use a number of storage vendors tools (ECC, DFM, etc) as I note in my blog they all are pretty much crap: of the ones I’ve used it pains me to say this but unfortunately ECC has probably been the better of them but it’s still crap and they’ve had it for years and years to try and improve. IMO it’s very hard to argue that EMC does management tools better than VMWare (they have more of them all completely different beasts). While VirtualCenter is no where near “great” (try to get storage perf data out of it). The fact that they have been doing it better than us has to have been noticed by EMC/VMWare.

    • http://www.brookend.com Chris Evans

      So do you think we’ll see creep of free features? i.e. over time, more value add features will be freely offered?

      Chris

  • http://blog.insanegeeks.com InsaneGeek@insanegeeks.com

    Will features become free… that’s an interesting question. A while back everybody was using the “our hypervisor is free” method against VMWare, so in response they eventually made the hypervisor free; so it seems like there could be a repeat of history regarding features. But it’s a bit different now, in that before they weren’t charging for the hypervisor, the vendors VMWare, Xen, RedHat, Microsoft are already charging for the management/features layer. It’s a lot easier to give something away when you haven’t had any incoming dollars against it yet, after you are receiving a revenue stream I think that option becomes much harder.

    There is going to be some features being pushed into the free versions but probably very limited as that’s how they all are making money; more likely is that some of the features available in the top end versions will be pushed into the less expensive versions (ESX Adv -> ESX Std, MS Ent -> MS Std, etc) as the vendors play take jabs at each other, but I don’t think in general there will be much more going into the free column from a bare-metal hypervisor market.

    Having said that I do think that one of the vendors will step off the ledge and start giving away something substantial for free, in a pure bid to try and become #1 or more likely in a bid to not fall behind and become irrelevant.

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