EMC: People are going to be FLASHING their RACKS next year

EMC's chief evangelist Chad Sakac got up at an investor conference and said DSSD systems should arrive in limited availability next year.

Startup firm DSSD was developing rack-scale all-flash array technology when EMC bought it in May. We'e thinking an EVO: RACK type converged system is coming.

Stifel Nicolaus MD Aaron Rakers reported on what the investors and analysts heard from EMC:

• In an anti-Elliott Management riposte Sakac said the Federation structure is best for EMC as it enables it to respond simultaneously on many fronts in a storage market where many technologies are going to be used and not just one.
• The biggest storage market growth is in exabyte-scale object stores.
• Converged infrastructure will likely be the dominant way that enterprises consume IT as they look to simplify acquisition, deployment and operations.
• EMC has shipped DSSD to a few customers and expects it to be in directed (limited) availability in early 2015.
• Enterprises realise that the new storage architectural model includes all of the various pieces (i.e., scale up/down, tightly coupled scale-out, loosely coupled scale-out, distributed share nothing architectures, and non-volatile memory on servers) with an abstraction layer on top of it (think ViPR).
• EMC is now Cisco's single largest UCS and Nexus customer and this binds the two companies closely together despite competition in other areas of the business.
• VMware's vCloud Air offers object stores more economically than AWS.

EMC is going to hit 2015 running with a chairman/CEO change coming in February when Joe Tucci is scheduled to retire. If EMC truly expects the Federation structure to survive Elliott Management's breakup attack then it must have a successor in mind for Joe.

Who might that be?

The three operational CEOs in the Federation are EMC II's David Goulden, VMware's Pat Gelsinger, and Pivotal's Paul Maritz. Is one of them pre-picked for the Federation's Iron Throne? And, if one is, who will succeed him in EMC's Game of Thrones? ®