Good post by Chris M. Evans (thank you)
If the weekend IT press is to be believed, EMC are on the verge of acquiring solid-state array vendor XtremIO in a deal worth around $450 million. This would be a remarkable outcome for a company that is still technically “in stealth mode” and has no obvious revenue or customers.
Why would EMC do this? Their normal acquisition process is to look for targets that have well established customer bases, such as Isilon or Greenplum. XtremIO’s technology is unvalidated in the marketplace and there are already many other competitors out there; Violin Memory and Pure Storage to name only two.
In February EMC announced two new products, codenamed Lightning and Thunder (details). Lightning became VFCache, a PCIe SSD card and was due to ship pretty much immediately. However, Thunder was described in more ephemeral terms, with no real substance. Did Thunder really exist at the time, or was the announcement more of an aspirational statement? Did Thunder exist and have EMC had issues bringing the product to market? In either scenario, the acquisition of XtremIO could be the basis of Thunder, explaining why EMC has chosen to bid on a product with no validation or history.
Let’s assume that this theory is wrong and XtremIO would be added to the existing hardware portfolio. This would mean EMC has four main product lines that provide all-flash storage – VNX, VMAX, Thunder and XtremIO. How would they all be differentiated and how would EMC avoid considerable confusion when selling to end customers?
Read on here
