Dell's PowerEdge R640 aims to deliver a balanced combination of storage, processing power and rack density, and in this exclusive review, we bring you a first look at its new 14th-gen 1U rack server. Naturally, Intel's Xeon Scalable family is at the top of Dell's agenda and a new internal cooling design allows the R640 to support every CPU model right up to the 205W 28-core Platinum 8180.

Storage options are equally impressive, as the chassis is available with four LFF, eight SFF or ten SFF drives. There's room for two more SFF drives at the rear in an optional hot-swap cage and the server can support up to eight PCIe NVMe SSDs out of the box.

Hard disks are all handled by Dell's 10th-gen PERC controllers which have 8GB of flash-backed NV cache memory - a quadrupling over the previous generation. The new H740P and H840P adapters are SAS3 ready and their Harpoon-based RoC (RAID on chip) provides a performance boost for handling high-IOPS SSDs.

All 14th -gen PowerEdge servers showcase Dell's new iDRAC9 remote management controller, which delivers a completely revamped web interface and a wealth of new features. Platform security is tight as well and includes cryptographically-signed firmware packages plus a lockdown mode to stop unauthorized system configuration changes.

Storage options

Dell offers a lot of storage options so ensure you make the right choices to avoid future upgrades. All three Smart Flexi Value models are offered with eight or ten SFF drive bays with only the standard model supporting four LFF bays.

The SFF models offer two backplanes with the 8-bay version supporting SAS3, NL-SAS and SATA hard disks. We review the 10-bay version - which you'll need if you want to use PCIe NVMe SSDs as well as SAS3 hard disks.

The Xeon Scalable CPUs increase the number of PCIe lanes from 40 to 48 and Dell's NVMe implementation takes advantage of this. The 10-bay backplane is plugged into a SAS expander board behind it, but also has onboard NVMe connectors cabled directly to the motherboard.

These use the eight extra PCIe lanes allowing you to direct-attach up to eight NVMe drives in the front bays without requiring extra adapter cards. Mind you, they aren't cheap; Dell's 3.2TB mixed-use NVMe drives cost over six grand apiece.

Dell's BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) card does away with the need to put the OS on a hard disk. Included in our review system, the BOSS is a PCIe adapter card with dual M.2 SATA SSD slots which supports mirroring.

Internal design

There's a lot going on inside the R640's busy interior but all cabling is neatly tucked out of the way for easy access to key components. Eight hot-plug fan modules reside in front of the motherboard and for NMVe drives and higher-end CPUs, you'll need to specify high-performance models.

The price includes the PERC H740P Mini snap-in RAID module. This supports all the usual RAID suspects including RAID6 and 60 and has 8GB of NVRAM cache with a battery backup pack tucked away neatly on top.

Our system came with 192GB of 2,667MHz DDR4 memory which can be boosted to 768GB using RDIMMs or 1.5TB with LRDIMMs. The R640 also supports up to twelve Persistent Memory NVDIMM-N modules which combine 16GB of high-performance DRAM with integral Flash backup and use a dedicated battery backup module which fits on top of the SAS expander board.

Up to three PCIe expansion slots are available and underneath their cage is a dedicated slot for Dell's network daughtercards. We were supplied with the dual Gigabit/10GBase-T model and other options include quad Gigabit, quad 10GbE SFP+ or dual 25GbE.

Server management and security

Dell's new iDRAC9 is a winner for remote management as its smart HTML5-based web interface delivers a veritable wealth of information on server operations. The Dashboard screen provides a quick view on overall system health plus quick access to logs and a virtual remote control console.

The System tab reveals everything you need to know about power consumption or cooling and provides performance graphs for CPUs, memory and I/O usage. Activating the System Lockdown mode blocks any further configuration changes and you can use the System Erase feature to safely destroy data on decommissioned drives.

Dell scores over HPE's iLO5 with its Quick Sync 2 feature which we used to link our iPad to the server over Bluetooth. The OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app allowed us to view all server information, receive alerts, reboot it and control it using the free VNC Viewer app.

Dell's OpenManage Enterprise isn't due for release until mid-2018 but while you're waiting, you can use its free OpenManage Essentials software. We employed it to manage all our Dell network devices, perform inventories and activate its advanced alerting system.

Verdict

The PowerEdge R640 packs a lot into its compact 1U chassis and delivers some innovative storage features as well. Support for the entire family of Xeon Scalable CPUs means it can easily be customised to suit a wide range of workloads and budgets while the new iDRAC9 controller sets new standards for server management.

Verdict

The powerful PowerEdge R640 squeezes a remarkable range of features into its 1U chassis making it the ideal choice for enterprises that want the best rack density in their data centre

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 2 x 2.1GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6130

Memory: 192GB ECC DDR4 2,667MHz (max 1.5TB with LRDIMMs)

Storage bays: 10 SFF front hot-swap (supports 8 x NVMe SSDs)

RAID: Dell PERC H730P Mini SAS3/8GB NVRAM cache/BBU

Storage included: 5 x 300GB 15K SAS3 SFF hard disks

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60

Network: 2 x Gigabit/2 x 10GBase-T daughtercard

Expansion: 3 x PCI-e 3.0 slots

Other: BOSS card with 2 x 240GB M.2 SATA SSDs

Cooling: 8 x hot-plug performance fans

Power: 2 x 1600W Platinum hot-swap PSUs

Management: Dell iDRAC9 Enterprise

Warranty 3yrs standard on-site NBD

A new opportunity is emerging for the channel in the mid-market, thanks to the potential benefits offered by hyper-converged infrastructure.

By uniting in a single integrated system the technology stack of storage, compute, virtualisation and (optionally) network, hyper-converged infrastructure cuts integration and maintenance costs and provides a means to introduce new capabilities without shelling out for additional hardware.

Hyperconvergence provides the option to leapfrog systems based around separate servers, storage and virtualisation systems, making it worthy of serious consideration by organisations that haven't made the move to the cloud -- many of whom are in the mid-market.

Indeed, the potential of hyper-converged infrastructure has been recognised by analyst house IDC, which expects the market to grow by 60% per year until 2019, hitting close to $4 billion in sales. And most of this growth is predicted to come from the mid-market.

The case for the mid-market

A major benefit of hyper-converged infrastructure for mid-sized organisations is the economies of scale it brings. By pre-configuring the different technology elements as an appliance, there is no need to integrate the different elements, reducing complexity and significantly cutting deployment time.

And whatever the customer wants from its IT services, resources can be quickly allocated to cater for it – whether it be virtualisation, app development and testing, analytics, remote sales, HR, or inventory management.

The ability to scale on demand also significantly benefits mid-market organisations – unlike traditional infrastructure they no longer need to size for the future so see significant life cycle savings. With hyper-converged systems, organisations can buy just what they need for today's workloads and simple scale in the future when needed.

Making hyperconvergence work for the channel

Hyperconvergence is a simple sell for the channel – by buying compute, storage networking and virtualisation in a single appliance, the customer is able to save money and time. It also simplifies product lines that channel partners can sell.

Selling hyperconvergence is also an opportunity for channel partners to make the leap from a transactional relationship with customers to something far more consultative, advising mid-market customers on the role hyper-converged infrastructure plays as they transition to the cloud.

Channel partners must gain an understanding of the application and business challenges hyperconvergence will address for individual customers.

For example, if there are concerns around IT management or space restrictions, hyper-converged infrastructure offers a ready solution. Or, if organisations want more flexibility to expand their physical infrastructure at speed, again, there is a place for hyperconvergence.

The step to hyperconvergence is pretty easy for customers familiar with virtualisation to understand, the sales process is more difficult when a customer isn't already pursuing virtualisation. So the channel has a role to play in educating them about definitions, as there are subtle differences between 'hyper-converged', 'converged' and 'virtualisation' that need to be made clear.

By approaching customers about hyperconvergence in this consultative way and using the right language, channel partners can also open up the possibility of reaching higher up the value stack to support customers as they undergo further digital transformation.

The potential for hyperconvergence to reduce costs means customer budgets can be shifted to higher-value activities related to specific business needs. This could include building mobile apps for customers, strengthening disaster recovery or making the shift from physical to virtual desktops -- all of which offer scope for channel players to increase their involvement.

Philippe Fosse is vice president of channel for EMC EMEA

Dell has finally completed its acquisition of EMC, almost a year after the planned merger was first announced.

The acquisition cost Dell $60 billion and is the largest technology merger in history. The new company, Dell Technologies, is now the world's largest privately held tech company, with $74 billion annual revenue and a 140,000-strong global workforce.

Dell Technologies comprises Dell (client solutions), Dell EMC (infrastructure solutions), Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware. It will be dual-headquartered in Round Rock, Texas and Hopkinton, Massachusetts - where Dell and EMC were headquartered respectively before the merger.

In a press and analyst call, Michael Dell said: "I think that the formation of Dell Technologies is an industry landscape changing event and if you think about the other companies out there, they are, in one form or another, reacting to what we have done.

"We have stated for a long time that scale matters and we think the ability to invest for the long-term matters, we think innovation and breadth of go-to-market reach matters as well and so we feel quite confident in our ability to grow and do well in both the new, interesting, fast-growth parts of our industry, as well as those where there is consolidation underway."

"We feel quite confident in the approach we have taken and we will see how the others react to it," he added.

The company reiterated that there are no immediate plans, post transaction, to merge or close any of the business units that now make up Dell Technologies - indeed, Dell spun off its software division to make room for EMC earlier this year - but said this could be reviewed in the future.

Dell's historic $63.4 billion (48.4 billion) acquisition of EMC is set to close next Wednesday, 7 September, after completing its final regulatory hurdle in China.

The announcement was made last night, one day after Dell CEO Michael Dell appeared on stage at VMware's VMworld 2016 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

While VMware is part of the EMC federation of companies, it was confirmed some time ago that the virtualisation veteran would continue to operate more-or-less as a separate company, as it is not totally owned by EMC. Indeed, according to several reports, Gelsinger and Michael Dell went out of their way to enforce the message of VMware's autonomy.

At EMC World this year, it was revealed by Michael Dell that the name of the new company will be Dell Technologies, but that the EMC name will live on in the EMC II division and yet-to-be-created Dell EMC division, which will look after business enterprise products.

In a statement, Michael Dell said: "This is an historic moment for both Dell and EMC. Combined, we will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT, including digital transformation, software-defined data centre, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security."

Outgoing EMC CEO, Joe Tucci, added: "I'm proud of everything we've built at EMC - from humble beginnings as a Boston-based startup to a global, world-class technology company."

"The combination of Dell and EMC creates a new powerhouse in the industry - providing the essential technology for the next era," he added.

No doubt the future of the unified company will, once again, be the main topic of discussion at Dell World 2016, which takes place from 18 to 20 October. Be sure to visit IT Pro for all the latest, live, then.

Third-party relationships can pose a significant security challenge for businesses, with a clear delineation of responsibility needed to help avoid pitfalls, IT Pro has been told.

Speaking at EMC World 2016, Rob Sadowski, director of market insight at RSA, told IT Pro that while the supply chain has always been a potential vector of attack for businesses, the number of connected devices in use in any organisation is making it more complex to deal with.

"I think that fortunately this is an area where people are starting to at least recognise that this is a challenge, so it's not that they are completely blind to this idea. But, how do they really wrap their heads around it?" said Sadowski. "What third party relationships do they have? Just cataloguing that is a tremendous challenge."

Even once the number and nature of each third party relationship is established, however, there can still be confusion over who is responsible for certain areas. Indeed, this is something that could go unnoticed for years until one party suffers a breach and each believes it was the other's responsibility to ensure it didn't happen.

"I think that's often the most challenging part - who are the third parties I work with, what are they supposed to be doing, and are they actually doing it?" said Sadowski.

"It becomes a very difficult task and one that, especially as things get more reliant on service providers, really requires a bit of automation and a good process, because third-party risk is really growing significantly as part of the organisation's overall risk profile," he said.

Help is at hand, however, and this issue is being increasingly recognised by standards bodies, which are beginning to incorporate it into their guidelines.

"I think you see in some of the more progressive standards that are out there," said Sadowski. "Take, for example, the PCI Data Security Standard -- in the most recent revisions of the standard, there haven't been a lot of changes to core control objectives and things like that.

"Where some of the evolution has been is in how covered organisations deal with third parties [such as] clearly asking them ... [to] define who is responsible for what requirement and get acknowledgement from them that they are responsible."

EMC is targeting a swathe of new products at helping businesses get the most of their datacentres even as they upgrade their infrastructures.

Key to this strategy, revealed at its annual EMC World conference in Las Vegas,is the launch of EMC Unity, a new family of all-flash storage arrays announced today targeted at mid-market IT departments. As well as a purpose-built all-flash array, the file and block storage system can also be deployed in a hybrid or converged configuration, or software-defined through UnityVSA.

The company also announced Virtustream Storage Cloud, aimed at large enterprises, service providers and public sector bodies, and a new cloud-based service dashboard called EMC MyService360.

Additionally, the organisation announced EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management, which is intended to reduce the cost of storing and managing data by identifying multiple copies of the same data, allowing businesses to delete what they do not need to keep.

Finally, it announced ViPR Controller 3, which is designed to bridge the gap between traditional and cloud-native environments in a multivendor storage environment.

Several members of the company's senior management said this raft of announcements - with more to follow tomorrow - are proof that, despite some industry voices claiming the contrary, it has continued to innovate despite the upcoming merger with Dell, which is expected to complete by the end of this year.

Senior writer Jane McCallion is on the ground at EMC World 2016. Follow her on Twitter for live updates over the next three days and click here for more from this year's conference.

Michael Dell has unveiled the new name for Dell and EMC once the two companies finish their merger at the end of this year.

Joking that he was rather fond of his own family name, Dell told delegates at EMC World 2016 in Las Vegas that the family of companies currently known as the EMC Federation is to become Dell Technologies.

However, the EMC name will live on in the form of Dell EMC - the new name for the enterprise business division - and EMC II, the infrastructure division.

In addition to Dell EMC and EMC II, Dell Technologies will also comprise VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal, Dell (the client solutions business) and Virtustream.

"I've been looking forward to being right here on this stage since October, when we first announced the definitive agreement to combine Dell and EMC," said Dell during his section of the opening keynote. "We're creating the next great technology company for all you [customers and partners] to pave the way for your future - a future that will be defined by technology that is so powerful that it's hard to comprehend what is even possible."

"We are combining Dell with EMC to create the one best, most trusted, most innovative partner to help you navigate a successful path, to modernise your IT, to make it more agile, more efficient, easier to manage, but also help you create a digital future," he said.

Dell also used his section of the conference's opening keynote to talk up the power of being a privately held company - something he also made much of at Dell World 2015 - saying it will allow the newly formed company to take a longer view and make more solid future investments.

"All of this we get to operate as a private company under a private structure. We can invest for the long term, no 90-day shop talk, and [have] complete alignment from our massive innovation agenda to our leadership and our ownership 100 per cent focused on you, our customers," he said.

There is still no fixed date for when the acquisition will be completed, as it is still waiting to be given the green light by the Chinese regulator, but a slide seen by IT Pro suggests the two companies are anticipating becoming one ahead of the next Dell World conference, which takes place in mid-October.

Businesses are suffering from a reverse IT skills gap, according to research from VCE, the converged infrastructure wing of the EMC Federation.

The investigation, which has been published in a report called Endangered IT, showed many IT workers are at risk of becoming obsolete because they are too specialised in disciplines that are increasingly being outsourced.

Speaking at a roundtable held in London to launch the report, EMEA CTO of VCE Nigel Moulton said: "Traditional IT people still think very much in the 'build it yourself mentality', [whereas] business leaders want them to think in the buy/acquire capability mentality.

"So here you start to see a set of data that actually, when we go down this route, the traditional approach is not going to serve us well."

The survey showed that the move towards "buy", which is to say cloud and managed services, leads to a reduction in IT budgets but also exposes a significant skills gap between IT workers, the way that they interact with each other, and the way they interact with other areas of the business.

"If you think about the way that IT has been traditionally constructed, I have siloes of IT people in my IT department I have storage guys, I have server people, I have network people, I have virtualisation people and I have this bunch of guys called app developers who are responsible for creating the end product," explained Moulton.

"But those divisions within IT don't speak to each other and when they do it's a completely different set of languages... because the languages that they use are embedded in the technologies that they know," he said.

This communication problem can become even more stark when they are dealing, or failing to deal with, other areas of the business, which leads to departments acquiring their own technology outside the purview of the IT department.

But all is not lost. According to the survey, some CIOs are now taking action to train their staff so they understand multiple disciplines and not just one. That also requires them to become more integrated with the rest of the business, particularly their C-suite colleagues, to better understand its overall needs and champion the IT department.

"The executives leading IT and those leading business functions need to and common ground in terms of the technology challenges and opportunities facing the business over the coming years," the report concludes.

Dell is selling off its services vision to NTT Data for $3 billion (2 billion) to help fund its $67 billion (46.5 billion) takeover of EMC.

Dell bought Perot Systems, which forms the bedrock of the services division, in 2009 for $3.9 billion, meaning the Austin-based firm is making a loss on the sale. However, the merger with EMC is expensive and Dell consequently needs the money.

The move also differentiates Dell from its competitors, notably IBM and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which have been talking up their service provider credentials over the past 12 months.

When Dell first announced the merger in October 2015, it said the acquisition would be completed between May and October 2016. It is now thought the closing announcement could be made at EMC World, which takes place between 2 - 5 May this year. Michael Dell is one of the keynote speakers on the first day of the conference.

From the point of view of NTT Data, which is owned by Japanese telco NTT, the acquisition of Dell Services will provide a significant inroad into the North American market.

NTT Data CEO Joen McCain said: Dell Services is a well-run business and we believe its employee base, long-standing client relationships and the mix of long-term and project-based work will enhance our portfolio."

"We are confident this transaction will be positive for clients, employees and shareholders, and will advance our collective vision to be an innovative partner for our clients," he added.

EMC has announced two new products aimed at moving datacentres away from hard disks and to flash storage. The VMAX All Flash is a series of solid state disk arrays that go all the way up to 4PB or 4000TB.

Available in two new models, the VMAX 450 and 850, EMC claims VMAX All Flash is the biggest all flash storage unit on the planet' yet is less expensive than comparable traditional 15000rpm hard disk arrays. The company also claims that its Write Folding technology improves flash durability without affecting performance.

Each VMAX All Flash array is made of V-Bricks. A V-Brick consists of a single VMAX controller and 53TB of storage capacity that can be increased to 500TB in 13TB steps. Each V-Brick can manage up to eight controllers and 4PB of storage and can cache up to 16TB.

The entire array is backed by a flat-priced maintenance plan the Xpect More Program. This lifetime plan will guarantee the endurance of the flash modules, replacing them for free if they fail. Plus there's a three-year, money-back warranty.

EMC also launched DSSD D5, a PCI-based 144TB 5U flash storage array based on EMC's own Rackscale Flash' silicon design and almost non-existent' latency. Based on industry standard PCI Express Gen3 and NVMe technologies, EMC claims performance of 10 million IOPS, 100GB/s speeds with a 100 microsecond latency.

Up to 48 direct attached servers can use each DSSD D5. Each D5 array consists of 36 custom form factor hot pluggable flash modules. Each module has two NVMe PCI Express-based connectors for use with two controllers simultaneously. The connection cables themselves are 96 thick four-lane leads. It's worth bearing in mind that only' 100TB of the 144TB raw capacity available for use.

EMC claims reliability isn't an issue due to its own proprietary wear levelling, garbage collection and Cubic' RAID technologies. Plus, with redundant components, there shouldn't be a single point of failure and thus it should be well-suited for mission-critical enterprise systems.

To connect it to your servers, EMC sells PCI host adapter cards that plug into any server. To get the most out of the DSSD D5, EMC recommends using its own Flood API which bypasses the file system and other aspects of the operating system to connect applications directly to the SSD.

The US military "fully intends to take advantage of the real time analytics" made possible by DSSD D5 according to Douglas Babb, a chief IT architect for the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, the Texas Advanced Computing Center is already running 50 to 100 scientific supercomputing projects on DSSD D5 according to its executive director, Dan Stanzione.

Dell’s planned acquisition of EMC has been a major talking point for our channel partners ever since it was first announced last October. The $63bn merger of the major hardware vendor with the global leader in storage, security, virtualisation and cloud computing will make Dell one of the world’s largest IT companies, just behind Microsoft and IBM. The EMC portfolio includes major IT companies and technologies such as VMware, RSA Security, Pivotal and the acquisition raises questions about the future of all these brands.

Strategic sense

According to the McAfee 2016 Threat Predictions report, storage needs and network bandwidth will continue to grow extremely fast, as will the need for data deduplication. This will lead to a fivefold increase in storage market in five years. In light of these conditions, the Dell-EMC merger seems strategically correct for both parties. The deal will help the hardware provider broaden its product lineup to penetrate the enterprise market and respond to enduring threats from big tech giants like Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Cisco. For EMC, the combination may calm investors, particularly those demanding to see more growth. Since practice shows that big customers are more likely to buy from fewer suppliers, the company has a better chance to position itself in large enterprise sector, if it has “everything under the same roof”.

VMware status

Despite the positive overall outlook, the deal is not without its problem areas. The first one is the status of conflicting projects, namely, VMware. The greatest concern for VMware shareholders is that this data-center software subsidiary of EMC might become a victim of the deal’s complexity. No wonder that VMware stock price has fallen sharply by about 25 percent in the weeks since Dell first announced the acquisition of EMC. Further consternation followed EMC’s own announcement that the two companies’ cloud-computing offerings would be reorganized into a subsidiary named Virtustream. Ultimately, the key question about whether VMware will stay independent along with its commitment to working with other vendors, or be turned into another Dell reseller, remains unanswered. Analysts point out that the industry has a long history of companies collaborating and competing against each other; therefore, Dell will most likely explore ways to integrate its hardware products into VMware sales without sacrificing its independence.

Non-core software assets face an uncertain future

A more immediate concern for Dell’s customers and stakeholders is the question mark hanging over the company’s software business. Rumors about the possible selling of previous acquisitions like Quest Software, SonicWall, Perot Systems and AppAssure are rife. Some say that disposing of these would be a logical step, helping Dell to focus on its most valuable assets and get the scale it needs to dominate the large enterprise storage segment. However, while the very existence of EMC’s software businesses remains uncertain it causes considerable strain for customers and the resellers that serve them.

This is not just true for existing customers looking for reassurance about the continuation of products they have been using for a long time, but also for new customers who might be thinking of purchasing these systems for the first time. In consequence, both current and potential customers of Dell are probably interested in exploring alternatives, which gives competitors carte blanche to fight for Dell’s current market share.

Peter Smith is regional sales manager for Europe at Netwrix

EMC is preparing to slash its workforce ahead of the company's acquisition by Dell.

According to a filing with the SEC, the organisation has set aside $250 million (169 million) for the cull, which "will be substantially completed by the end of the first quarter of 2016".

The company said the planned redundancies are part of its programme to reduce annual costs by $850 million by 2017, which was announced in July.

Dell subsequently announced its intention to buy EMC in November 2015, with the deal expected to close within the first half of this year, but it does not seem that this has had any effect on EMC's slimming mission.

While Michael Dell said the acquisition is "more about revenue synergies than cost synergies" at Dell World in November, he did not deny that some jobs may go in the process. It is unclear whether this would be in addition to those for which the $250 million fund has been set aside.

EMC has not revealed how many jobs are set to go, nor where the axe will fall. However, there have been persistent rumours that the company's 3,000-strong workforce in the Republic of Ireland could be a major victim of the cuts, particularly as Dell already has a similar number of staff in the country.

The Dell-EMC merger, valued at $67 billion (45 billion), will be the biggest ever seen in the tech world when it completes within the next six months.

Picture courtesy of EMC

EMC, recently bought by Dell, has launched an open source project focused on making the management of commodity storage hardware easier.

Originally launched as Project OnRack in May, RackHD is an open source physical hardware management and orchestration (M&O) layer that automates discovery, description, provisioning and programming across a broad range of commodity servers, switches and storage.

According to EMC, the technology provides an API as a component in a larger orchestration system or creates a user interface for managing hardware services, regardless of the underlying hardware in place.

It said that this would help firms accelerate their deployment of modern applications that rely on large numbers of commodity servers and heterogeneous infrastructure.

Its CoprHD automation software has also been open sourced, as has its Project Rex-Ray technology.

CoprHD centralises commodity storage into a "simple and extensible platform", and the new CoprHD Community made its first official release with CoprHD 2.4 to include new features, projects, community contributors and a new licensing switch to Apache License, Version 2.0.

The latest version expands the scope of CoprHD to include EMC ECS object storage, as well as a new REST API for EMC XtremIO 4.0 software.

EMC's open source community for CoprHD has also developed a Southbound Software Development Kit (SDK) designed to allow storage vendors and other third parties to more easily add support for other storage systems to CoprHD.

Students at Oregon State University are developing the first plugin using the SouthBound SDK for a new EMC ScaleIO driver.

EMC said that this will eventually replace the ScaleIO driver in the current release and will serve as a test case for further development of the SouthBound SDK.

The company also announced a new release of its REX-Ray storage orchestration engine, containing a variety of new updates through community contribution including expanded storage platform support for GCE (Google Compute Engine) as well as EMC Isilon and EMC VMAX storage systems.

John Roese, senior vice president and CTO of EMC, said his firm hoped "that by making these technologies open and accessible that our collective efforts with the development community will benefit a broad range of organisations and applications".

Michael Dell sounded a confident, somewhat defiant note today on his decision two years ago to take his company private, claiming it enables the business to take a more long-term, future-facing strategy then when it was a public business.

Dell famously wrested back control of his business, with the aid of Silverlake Partners, in 2013 after an attempt by activist investor Carl Icahn and allies to oust him.

According to Dell, the acquisition of EMC was largely enabled by the fact that Dell is now a private company.

After taking his firm off the stock market, Michael Dell said he "kept being asked if we would still do acquisitions. Well, go big or go home, baby!"

Dell added that, when the company was taken private, he described it as "the world's biggest start-up".

"When we take EMC private, wow - who knew how big a startup could be," he joked at Dell World 2015 in Austin, Texas.

From micro to mega

One of the main benefits of uniting Dell and EMC is that the combined company will cover businesses of all sizes, from the smallest SMB to the largest enterprise, added the CEO.

"EMC has an unmatched reputation with large enterprises. At Dell, we have unmatched strength in small and mid-market," he said.

Indeed, Michael Dell was at pains to say that the acquisition of EMC won't make Dell an enterprise-only focused company.

"We love small and mid-sized businesses," he said. "It's the fastest growing part of the [US] market, and we see the same trend across the world."

The expected $67bn purchase of EMC (NYSE:EMC) by Dell is potentially the biggest IT deal ever with far reaching consequences for partners and rivals.

Although still not finalised, the deal would create a company with an estimated 170,000 staff, combined revenues of possibly $80bn and a channel community of roughly 140,000 partners. There is a lot of conjecture in even these numbers due to the private nature of Dell, the status of the various EMC businesses and the speculation on how Dell will digest EMC over what will likely be a multi-year reorganisation process.

The combined entity would remain and extend its lead as the world largest storage vendor but crucially for Dell, it would give it access to a strengthened software ecosystem including a chunk of VMware (NYSE:VMW) revenues, RSA security and Pivotal, a cloud software development platform. Although not all one way traffic, the deal would strengthen the overall storage portfolio by raising the profile of the highly regarded Compellent technology Dell acquired a few years back.

Although Dell has established a foothold in the enterprise, the perception of many customers and partners is still “cheap and cheerful” and although somewhat unfair, the tag has stuck with largely uninspiring products across storage, networking and modest software acquisitions.

In terms of R&D, Dell has little heritage in developing new technologies compared to EMC. Yet, where EMC has enterprise credentials, Dell has stronger brand within SMEs and more cost conscious buyers reaching down into the consumer space. This means that EMC brands that have not been that successful (like Iomega) may well get a new lease of life as Dell products are re-tasked for SMBs.

Golden geese

What the deal will mean for the various product lines is still a highly speculative exercise. But statements from EMC and Dell suggest that VMware, the fastest growing aspect of the EMC portfolio will be largely left alone. As a VMware COO Carl Eschenbach says, there will “not a lot of change” or a more candid description by a another VMWare exec, “They won’t want to kill the golden goose”

With annual revenues of just over $6bn and consistent double digit YOY growth over the last five years, VMware has weaved a string of deals with everybody from Cisco, HP, NetApp and others to keep it the Switzerland of virtualisation, in a world that sees Microsoft slowly catching up in terms of hypervisors. With OpenStack as an increasingly credible rival to VMware’s cloud vision; only the much more advanced feature set and engineering prowess of VMware keep both rivals from reaching parity any time soon.

It seems likely that the Dell takeover will try to do as little damage as possible to this position. Although from Dell’s perspective, every sale that includes a VMWare component is more profitable than any pitch for Hyper-V, KVM or OpenStack.

The deal also gets Dell into the cloud space, an area in which the firm has been sluggish. Although VMware’s vCloud Air is light on features compared to AWS, it’s catching up fast, and crucially, has the continuity of brand between on-premise, hybrid VMWare clouds and a service offering.

The same, although to a much lower degree, could apply to RSA which has great partner relationships and a respected security portfolio, as well as long standing customers within the public and private sectors. Although not broken out in financial guidance, RSA has probable annual revenues of around a billion dollars. Pivotal, the EMC-owned cloud and big data application development software is probably another billion dollar a year business, although EMC doesn’t break the numbers out. Dell already sells Pivotal Cloud Foundry software so, again, probably no change there. What is interesting is that across financial guidance from EMC over the last few years it is the software parts of the business that are growing while hardware is essentially flat, or declining in certain areas.

Cultural changes

Dell has made a transition over the last few years to become a more channel-centric vendor, especially in the enterprise space. While EMC has a sizeable direct sales team that accounts for roughly half of its revenues, it is supported by an estimated 5000 VARs (a figure generated from the wisdom of a trio of analysts). Yet this is distorted as VMware, especially in Europe is 95 percent through the channel. The bride and groom, when you even out all the regional differences, are probably both 50/50 in terms of direct versus channel.

Although similar on paper, the cultures at the two firms are very different.

EMC has experienced a bit of channel conflict between its direct sales and channel and its teams are notoriously “effective” and even “aggressive” when it comes to sales. They are also focused on storage and are good at selling it.

Even as the number two seller of PC and low end servers behind HP, Dell has traditionally had a pragmatic view of solution sales. Led from the top, Dell even with its own brand servers, networking, and storage and security products is often considered a top tier reseller for the likes of HP printers, Kaspersky security and even some EMC storage from its old OEM agreement days. The EMC deal will clearly strengthen the storage portfolio but the limitations of Dell in areas like networking or print means that big “all Dell end-to-end” deals will still mix and match many friendly vendors.

Distribution and recruitment

Distribution is likely to stay consistent although EMC’s severing its relationship with Ingram Micro earlier this year might see a reversal as Ingram is a flagship Dell distributor. For partners, in the short term little change is likely. Gaining EMC certifications, especially at the higher end and across legacy platforms is not a simple online questionnaire like some of the consumer grade partner certs. Invested EMC partners should have no concerns that the hordes Dell partners will suddenly turn up at high-value Isilon deals – it’s just not going to happen.

Although expect programmes for large VARS that provide additional rebates for using Dell desktop, servers, blades and possible some low end networking into bigger deals that centre around either EMC storage, or maybe a bit further down the line, VMware hybrid cloud. The deal is also a door opener into some markets, for example public sector, where Dell has been weak.

Is Mike happy?

The question still remains if the acquisition will be a good deal for Dell? That is anybody’s guess. With some proposed financial wizardry involving the ownership of the majority of voting stock in VMware while it still remains public, Michael Dell has gotten shareholders off his back and instead will carry a big debt pile. A prospect he obviously prefers to dealing with activist investors.

The deal makes sense if you consider that EMC’s heritage of big tin is fading. While Dell’s heritage as the direct, low cost vendor is threatened by rivals like Lenovo, Asus and others.

Both vendors have acquired higher value software, although VMware eclipses all the software deals of Dell such as SecureWorks and Quest. Yet for the deal to work, its needs to benefit from economies of scale and this will probably mean a reduction in headcount and product portfolio where there is duplication. Mid-level marketing, sales and administrative tasks are also ripe for some cost cutting.

But nobody should expect a repeat of the bloodbath happening at HP which says it expects to cut 58,000 jobs by end of fiscal year 2015. Dell is already pretty lean as is EMC. The federation model of EMC also means that that headline staffing numbers are relatively svelte as it stands.

But is it a good deal for Dell as a business? In the short term, probably not a major jolt to profits after restructuring and transition costs. Yet the deeply entrenched EMC customers are a good source of ongoing maintenance and support contracts as are VMWare licences, which will continue to grow in lock step with cloud. Although a plethora of CEOs from big rival IT vendors have slung a bit of mud at the deal, you get the sense that on the ground, the deciding factor will be customers.

As one VMware partner at this week’s VMworld in Barcelona event commented: “If our customers want to use Dell or HP servers, we really don’t care because they all run ESX so I don’t really see the big deal…”

NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) has made changes to its partner programme in a bid to help the channel benefit from the move to hybrid cloud.

Among the new offerings to partners includes specialisation training, new services, and end-to-end Data Fabric solution kits for partners to assist customers in piloting cloud projects.

The vendor says that according to its own research, nearly 75 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, but only 29 percent consider themselves good or excellent at managing data across multiple clouds. It said that IT teams need knowledgeable resources to help them manage, move, and protect their data across any deployment model.

NetApp unveiled the following training specialisations to help the channel find more business opportunities.

Its Partner Specialisation programmes include its Clustered Data ONTAP Transition Services. This is a new programme for partners who have completed advanced training to assist customers with the full range of migration services, including full installation, advanced configuration, and data migration. NetApp distribution partners, such as Arrow and Avnet, offer versions of this training for their reseller networks.

It also unveiled its Data Fabric Solution Essentials, new solution kits for specific workloads make it easy for partners to assist customers in piloting cloud projects. Kits combine software, systems, and/or services to speed deployment and show the immediate benefits of hybrid cloud.

Its Application Acceleration solution kit, aimed at database professionals, allows partners to quickly deploy a small four-node cluster for their customers with Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle databases. The kit showcases the capabilities of NetApp all-flash and clustered Data ONTAP to protect against data loss; provide high, consistent performance; and deliver comprehensive data management across flash, disk, and cloud resources in a single platform, the firm claims.

Its OpenStack Solution Kit with FlexPod, the vendor claimed, enables FlexPod Premium Partners to get customers up and running on an OpenStack private cloud in days, not months, with known costs and proven capabilities.

Lastly, its Snap-to-Cloud DR solution kit offers partners a single replication solution to meet their customers’ needs for disaster recovery, business intelligence, data distribution, and development testing. Includes a one-year license for the NetApp Cloud ONTAP software subscription as well as installation services and three years of support.

“The hybrid cloud gives organisations a platform for supporting new ideas and driving business transformation in ways they could never imagine,” says Bill Lipsin, vice president, worldwide channel, NetApp. “Partners with cloud skills, cloud-ready solutions, and expertise in data fabric architectures will be more successful reaching new buyers and strengthening existing relationships. NetApp supports our partners with services and solutions that help their customers realise the full potential of the hybrid cloud and make the best decisions for their business.”

HP CEO Meg Whitman has savaged Dell's decision to acquire EMC for $67 billion, claiming her PC and server rival Michael Dell will have to pay $2.5 billion a year in interest on the accumulated debt of the deal.

Writing in a letter addressed to all HP employees, and obtained by Business Insider, Whitman said: "To pay back the interest on the $50 billion of debt that the new combined company will have on their balance sheet, Dell will need to pay roughly $2.5 billion a year in interest alone.

"That's $2.5 billion that they will allocate away from R&D and other business critical activities, which will keep them from better serving their customers."

She additionally claimed that HP's own hybrid cloud strategy was two years ahead of any competitors', while rallying the troops with her email, titled Seize the moment, saying: "We're organised, we have a strong balance sheet and our innovation engine is humming. So, get out in front of your customers and your partners. Tell them our story. Take advantage of this moment."

Dell's purchase of EMC means the company will have massively grown in size by the deal's mid-2016 completion, while HP is splitting into two - business services-oriented HP Enterprise and HP Inc, its printers and PCs arm.

But Whitman nearly bought EMC last year, according to reports, until she and EMC CEO Joe Tucci could not agree on price.

Other criticism of the Dell and EMC tie-up came today from Magister Advisors, specialists in technology sector mergers and acquisitions.

It claimed the deal is not transformative, but simply consolidates two tech giants without adding extra value.

Managing partner Victor Basta added: "You would expect a $67 billion deal to shift the plate tectonics of the industry, but this is far from that.

"EMC's VMware software business (which will remain independent and public) the only potentially transformative element - is left out of the Dell deal altogether. The big bet Dell/EMC are making is that corporate IT budgets remain healthy, and there are enough economies of scale to increase margins for the combined company."

12/10/15: Dell yesterday confirmed its intention to acquire EMC in a $67 billion takeover, the biggest ever in the tech sector, taking the storage giant private while virtualisation specialist VMware remains a publicly-traded company.

The acquisition will not be complete until around the middle of next year, according to EMC boss Joe Tucci, but the firms plan to integrate their services into a comprehensive offering targeting SMBs and enterprises.

Dell CEO Michael Dell said on a conference call with media and analysts: "Dell's server, PC and go-to-market strengths in the mid-market [go] with EMC's go-to-market strengths in the enterprise market."

VMware, which EMC acquired back in 2004, will remain a publicly-traded firm, the tech giants confirmed, and Dell was quick to claim that the merger will not limit Dell's ability to partner with any non-Federation firms that it wishes to work with, especially when it comes to virtualisation.

"We are not choosing VMware exclusively," he said, then referencing Dell's long-standing partnership with Microsoft before adding: "Our customers will continue to have a wide set of choices. Certainly we see the opportunity to bring together and integrate existing technologies for customers, and customers like that integration."

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, who will remain in charge of the firm, echoed Dell's comments, saying: "We are committed - and Dell has demonstrated this commitment over decades at the company - to the independent ecosystem of VMware [that] is overwhelming and significant, just as we are committed to this partnership with each other."

While Dell has specialised in servers and PCs, EMC has concentrated on high-end storage equipment it believes is less at risk from the rise of cloud, and some of its companies bring additional services into the fold, like Pivotal's data analytics.

Tucci told media on the conference call: "The industry is going through a tremendous transformation where old ideas have been quickly disrupted, but it's incredibly rich with opportunity."

In a statement he added: "The waves of change we now see in our industry are unprecedented and, to navigate this change, we must create a new company for a new era. I truly believe that the combination of EMC and Dell will prove to be a winning combination for our customers, employees, partners and shareholders."

Both Dell and EMC claim the consolidation will generate growth for the pair in areas like software-defined datacentres, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud as well as mobile and security, but others were sceptical of the deal.

TechMarketView analyst Anthony Miller said: "This is all just another sign of panic among old guard' IT players trying to make sense of new world' IT. Bulking up with other old guard players is really not the right answer."

When asked whether Dell expects much overlap between its own products and those of the Federation's, a spokesman told IT Pro: "Many of Dell and EMC businesses are naturally complementary for example, Dell Servers with EMC Storage accelerate the adoption of converged infrastructure and Hybrid Cloud, RSA with SecureWorks; AirWatch with KACE; Pivotal with Boomi.

"There are many great technology combinations that will benefit our current and prospective customers."

Dell teamed up with private equity firm Silver Lake to fund the deal, and neither Dell nor EMC ruled out lay-offs as a result of the merger.

This article was originally published on 12/10/15 but has been updated multiple times (most recently on 13/10/15)

EMC (NYSE:EMC) has revealed more details about its Federation Ready partner programme, which went live in July.

The vendor says it has established the programme to make it easier for its channel partners to build solutions that combine offerings from itself and members of EMC’s federation of companies: VMware, RSA, Pivotal and VCE.

“Both our customers and our partners wanted a way to deal with the Federation with less friction,” says EMC’s global channel chief, Gregg Ambulos.

Partners will attain ‘Federation Ready’ status when they complete the appropriate sales and technical certifications in Federation technologies.

“It’s a big investment for partners to be Federation Ready; not every partner is able do it. You need to have a lot of certifications across all the Federated companies,” says Ambulos, who was speaking with press at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona.

These partners will earn addition incentives within all Federated channel programmes.

Ambulos says EMC is also going to appoint a Federation lead to be a common face for partners. They will oversee all activities including driving business and go-to-market plans.

The vendor is also introducing a registration desk “to remove friction and conflict” when registering sales opportunities.

Lastly, says the exec, EMC is also establishing rules of engagement to protect partner activities within the opportunity.

The new programme “masks that complexity” around the Federation, according to EMC’s VP of global partner marketing, Fred Kohout: “The Federation is a complicated business model; it’s not easy to provide unique value around Big Data, cloud, mobility…Gregg’s taking a complex business model that enables partners to deliver distinct value,” he says.

There are currently 15 partners globally working way their through the programme. Ambulos says he expects them to become fully fledged Federation Ready partners by the end of the year.

Dell has confirmed its intention to acquire EMC in a $67bn takeover, the biggest ever in the tech sector, taking the storage giant private while virtualisation specialist VMware remains a publicly-traded company.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) has addressed complaints from the channel that new sales targets introduced with the launch of its Business Partner Programme (BPP) earlier this year favour only the biggest channel partners.

While some partners have said new revenue thresholds are skewed in favour of larger partners, EMC’s VP of global partner marketing, Fred Kohout (pictured), says people are “getting tripped up” on the issue.

Describing the programme as “a framework that allows us to innovate over a period of years”, he says: “Regardless of where you are in the programme you earn dollar one rebate. Regardless of where you are in the programme you have access to the same presales and sales training as EMC…How we’ve structured the programme, it provides uniform access and uniform earn that fits [EMC channel mantra] ‘simple, predictable and profitable’.”

“The overall response to the programme has been very positive. It was very complex before, we have really simplified the programme,” adds Gregg Ambulos, SVP of global channel sales, speaking at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona.

However, feedback from partners is leading EMC to “make some adjustments” to its Silver tier, particularly around some of the rebate potential. “We’re looking at that going in 2016,” says Ambulos, who adds that there a few others areas the firm will look at based on feedback from partners. “They aren’t going to be big, dramatic changes, but tweaks,” he maintains.

Meanwhile, VP EMEA channels at EMC, Philippe Fosse, indicated that the vendor is likely to consolidate its two separate channel programmes (one for resellers and one for cloud service providers), “ending up with one programme in a year or two.”

“We are contemplating how to get after that,” confirmed Ambulos, adding there are “a lot of challenges in how you engage with a partner in a consistent, predictable way when they have multiple selling motions. We have this on the radar screen; I think it’s the next evolution of the partner programme.”

“Upwards of 70 percent” of EMC’s business goes through the channel in EMEA (including service providers), and “in the low 60s” percent globally.

Elsewhere, Ambulos said he wasn’t “in a positon to make any comment” regarding the current rumours circulating of a Dell takeover.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) is to buy cloud management service provider Virtustream for $1.2bn. The storage giant said it would incorporate Virtustream into its newly-formed cloud managed services business.

Virtustream was launched in 2008 and specialises in SAP software automation and cloud on-boarding. Its customers include companies such as Coca-Cola, Domino Sugar, Heinz, Hess Corporation, Kawasaki, Lexmark and Scotts Miracle-Gro.

The firm will operate within the federation of EMC businesses including Pivotal and VMware. EMC says the purchase “represents a transformational element of EMC's strategy to help customers move all applications to cloud-based IT environments.”

“With the addition of Virtustream, EMC will enable customers to move their entire application portfolio into a cloud environment,” it adds.

“Virtustream is an exceptional company and this is a critical and transformative acquisition for EMC in one of the industry's fastest-growing and most important sectors," says EMC chairman and CEO Joe Tucci. "With Virtustream in place, EMC will be uniquely positioned as a single source four our customers' entire hybrid cloud infrastructure and services needs.”

EMC says it plans to offer Virtustream’s xStream cloud management software, which is already integrated with VMware vSphere, to its partners. The addition of Virtustream to the EMC portfolio looks to be another building block in the federation business and damps down any speculation that it is to be broken up, despite activist shareholder Elliott Management pressuring the company to do so.

“Virtustream has established itself as an industry leader and innovator for running mission-critical enterprise applications in the cloud,” says Rodney Rogers, Virtustream chairman and CEO.

“We’re proud to be joining the EMC Federation where our combined capabilities, products and services will allow us to accelerate our vision of delivering the platform of record for enterprise systems, and address the complete breadth of cloud computing needs,” Rogers adds.

Howard Elias, president and chief operating officer of Global Enterprise Services at EMC says in a blog post that the firm was increasingly hearing from customers that they want the option to confidently move all workloads to an off-premise managed cloud model, including their most mission-critical applications like SAP.

“The significance of Virtustream is that it will also extend the EMC Federation’s capabilities to enable us to support everything from the smallest applications to the most I/O intensive enterprise applications, whether on or off prem, as we intend to incorporate this technology into the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution,” he says.

Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP says that his company has a long-term partnership with Virtustream to host mission-critical applications in the cloud.

“SAP will continue to serve as a partner with the new EMC managed cloud services business and we remain ever committed to supporting the hybrid cloud landscapes of shared customers around the world,” he says.

The all-cash deal is expected to close in the third quarter of the financial year with Rogers reporting to Tucci. The acquisition has already been approved by both sets of directors.

EMC has made its ViPR controller product available for free through an open source licence in response to customer demand.

The software-defined storage product will become the first software solution belonging to EMC to become an open source project, dubbed Project CoprHD (pronounced Copperhead).

It will be made available on GitHub for community-driven development under the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0).

This includes all the storage automation and control functionality that separates the data and control planes for operation.

Among other firms supporting the initiative are SAP, Verizon and Intel.

Speaking at EMC World, the firm said it wants to encourage all storage vendors to contribute to Project CoprHD, "further expanding the ecosystem and embracing open and standard APIs".

With the project, "customers, partners, service providers and system integrators can develop new service catalogue offerings with automated workflows to meet their customers' specific needs", said EMC.

"Building a strong developer community is crucial to the future success of EMC's software-defined storage and storage automation and management products," the firms added in a statement.

Both Project CoprHD and ViPR Controller will share core features and functionality, but ViPR Controller customers will get support and services from EMC.

Meanwhile, any changes made to Project CoprHD by the community will get fed back into ViPR, if EMC likes them.

EMC also offered its ScaleIO software as a free download for non-production use, without any time or capacity restrictions. It said the move would allow customers to create full-fledged ScaleIO environments for free non-production use before upgrading to a paid production licence.

"For anyone left confused, today's announcements prove this is not your father's EMC," said Jeremy Burton, president of products and marketing at EMC.

"By offering access to Project CoprHD, the open source version of EMC ViPR Controller and free downloads of EMC ScaleIO two key enabling pieces of our software-defined storage portfolio EMC has turned a corner by delving more deeply into open, collaborative software development with our customers, partners, developers and competitors.

"This represents a massive shift in our strategy that we believe will help accelerate our customers' efforts to develop new application-centric business models."

EMC has doubled the density of its XtremeIO-based X-Brick all-flash storage arrays as well as increasing the number of arrays the software supports.

Its new 40TB X-Brick flash storage systems are double that of the previous generation, while the update to XtremeIO 4.0 increases the cluster node limit from six to eight.

This means that raw maximum capacity of an XtremIO cluster node increases to 320TB.

At a keynote at EMC World in Las Vegas, Guy Churchward, president of EMC Core Technologies, said that with a six-to-one data reduction ratio, the capacity of full cluster increases to 1.9PB.

Churchward said that the update to XtremIO meant that it has transformed not only the speed at which applications run but also the entire way in which they are deployed.

"Customers gain agility, simplicity and capabilities that help them make developers more productive, get applications deployed faster, and deliver higher quality," he said.

The system is also capable of two million IOPS and a latency of less than 1ms.

The XtremeIO software also gains native replication due to a boost in speed in the firm's RecoverPoint software to help it keep pace with the all-flash platform. Xtreme 4.0 can create a replica every 60 seconds, according to EMC.

Unlike the previous version, XtremIO 3.0, the latest version can be upgraded without disruption with automatic rebalancing and no application downtime, according to the firm.

The latest version of XtremIO is being released as a free update to 3.0 customers.

Multiple clusters can be managed from one XtremeIO Management Server system.

There is also copy data management now available for VMware, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange.

The interface has had an update and now includes extended historical reporting, maintaining two years of operating history, as well as sophisticated tagging and search functionality for handling large numbers of provisioned volumes, hosts and snapshots. It also boasts improved built-in reporting capabilities.

Churchward added in the keynote that the product has grown faster than expected and was approaching $1 billion in revenues 18 months after release.

"XtremeIO has been a rocket ship success for us," he added, with the company claiming that more than 1,400 customers, including 40 per cent of Fortune 100 companies were now using the systems within their organisations.

EMC's virtualisation division, VCE, has launched a new range of "hyper-converged" rack-scale systems, known as VxRack.

Unveiled at EMC World in Las Vegas, VxRack allows enterprises and service providers to better manage deployment of mobile and cloud apps.

The new system uses EMC's ScaleIO software-defined storage, VMware vRealize management and orchestration suite and Cisco top-of-rack Nexus switching.

VCE claims the VxRack product allows users to start off with dozens of servers, but scale to thousands with up to 38 petabytes of storage capacity while delivering high performance/value per IOP.

The systems use VCE's infrastructure with single call lifecycle support, which it claims will help improve the customer's experience for the system.

It offers customers a choice of hypervisors to use, such as VMware vSphere, KVM or bare metal using ScaleIO software defined storage.

Future systems will be tailored for VMware environments, offering a fully integrated VMware stack based on VMware's EVO:RACK converged system technology and VMware Virtual SAN.

According to Praveen Akkiraju, chief executive of VCE, this version sporting EVO:RACK will come out in August.

Akkiraju said in a keynote that the system was very flexible.

"This is built on hyperconverged building blocks, you can get a compute intensive node, a storage intensive node and mix and match all these in the racks," he said.

"Customers can have quarter racks, half racks, full racks. You could even build out to thousands of racks it really scales out."

He added that networking was as flexible as the compute and storage nodes. "You can't really scale up unless networking is built in."

He said the best use case for the system were tier two workloads that could take advantage of hyperconverged systems. "Tier one workloads such as an ERP system would run on a vBlock," he said.

The system starts shipping in the third quarter of this year.

CIOs running software-defined storage on commodity hardware are risking severe data loss, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has warned.

The term software-defined storage has plenty of different interpretations within the industry, but is commonly described as a way to separate the software that controls storage tasks from the physical storage hardware.

The trend has benefits like avoiding vendor lock-in, because you can simply buy the storage management programming and pick off-the-shelf commodity hardware, and it's seen start-ups like Nexenta challenge incumbents such as EMC.

But HDS's chief engineer told IT Pro that while the Japanese giant is interested in the technology, it carries big risks for customers.

Speaking at Hitachi Connect 2015 in Las Vegas, Michael Hay said: "It's not for the faint of heart. We do a lot of work with our hardware OEM suppliers and in many cases there were some very high severity data loss issues we had to have them fix or we had to build workarounds [for]."

And he warned that those running storage software on commodity hardware should make sure it's been tested for compatibility.

"Nexenta, they just have the software and you pick your hardware. For us, if customers just want our software, we can give them a list of qualified suppliers, and they can buy off that no problem," said Hay.

"As soon as they deviate from that, we'll really have to talk about what does that mean. A lot of companies just gloss over it, they say it's no big deal, but you lose data.

"As a storage company, how can you actually with a straight face just say 'run it on whatever'?"

One example Hay gave was HDS's object storage system, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), whose S series suffered 40 separate data loss issues with the OEM, which the pair of vendors had to solve.

And Hay warned that without a significant number of in-house engineers, firms pairing software-defined storage with unqualified commodity hardware would face a challenge trying to solve such problems themselves.

"Unless you're a company who's prepared to go build that talent up yourself, how do you do that?" he said.

HDS itself launched a number of software-defined solutions yesterday at Hitachi Connect 2015, however.

These include an expansion to its range of Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) models, to provide customers with the storage virtualisation capability in different-sized capacities.

Hay said the new VSP range is "pure Intel", and HDS's Storage Virtualization Operating System can either sit on top of Intel's processor, or "replace it all with software".

And Hay admitted: "We're definitely preparing ourselves in case the market shifts one way or the other."

But that balancing act also means HDS is holding onto its hardware design centres, not wishing to get rid of its expertise in this area despite the software-defined trend.

"We still have the talent to build chips - if we find some benefit then we will," said Hay.

He pointed to Intel's mooted takeover of fellow chipmaker Altera, which builds reconfigurable processors, as one innovation that shows hardware can be more than just a commodity.

EMC has launched the Federation Business Data Lake, a product that merges storage and Big Data analytics technologies so organisations can more effectively collect, analyse and act on key business information qucikly and easily.

The solution can be implemented in just seven days, EMC claims, as it makes use of both structured and unstructured data a company holds to develop predictive models for the building of new products and applications.

The analytics layer features a Hadoop-based, In-Memory No-SQL and Scale-out MPP analytics support, with VMware running on Vblocks.

Jeffrey Kelly, principal analyst of Big Data at Wikibon, said: "As the number of connected devices continues to soar, the world of digital business is disrupting traditional business models. It's no longer just about the product itself, but the data and the application of the data.

"With Big Data, organisations can gather as much data as possible and apply analytic techniques to understand the data, make predictions and take action, resulting in the creation of new business models."

He went on to explain that solutions such as EMC's Federation Business Data Lake enable organisations to bring data, analytics and applications together to realise new business opportunities.

Josh Kahn, senior vice president of global solutions at EMC, added: "Nearly every traditional business model faces near-term, lasting disruption. The fast track to competitive advantage will be reserved for those able to quickly embrace and yield value from the massive growth in data, but it will take a new approach."

EMC also plans to launch two additional Data Lake solutions that will enable integration with a wide range of Hadoop distributions including Cloudera and Hortonworks. They will also support any future Open Data Platform-based Hadoop distribution.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) has announced it is to take over VCE, its joint venture alongside Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) and VMware (NYSE:VMW), as of this quarter.

Cisco and VMware will continue as strategic partners and investors, with Cisco having an approximately 10 percent equity interest.

EMC says VCE will focus on simplifying the deployment of hybrid clouds, including a range of converged infrastructure offerings. It will continue to deploy systems based on Vblock, which features the three vendors’ technologies.

Joe Tucci, Chairman and CEO of EMC, comments: “VCE was created to be a disruptive force by radically transforming and simplifying IT datacentre architectures, accelerating a shift to cloud computing. It has been a huge success and has changed the conversation with CIOs. VCE’s size, scale and market reach now requires a more traditional business structure.

“Our commitment to increased investment will enable VCE to significantly expand the scale and scope of its solutions, helping customers take better advantage of hybrid cloud and next-generation IT opportunities.”

VCE will remain intact under the leadership of CEO Praveen Akkiraju and his senior team with its own mission, operating charter and organisational structure. As part of EMC, VCE will be an integration point for technologies from across the company.

VCE surpassed a $2bn annual demand run-rate1 for Vblock and Vblock-related products and services exiting Q3 2014, its sixth consecutive quarter of greater than 50 percent year-over-year demand growth.

According to IDC, total worldwide spending on converged infrastructure is growing at 32.8 percent annually and will reach approximately $14.37bn in 2017 (up from $5.4bn in 2013).

More than 1,000 enterprises and service providers have deployed more than 2,000 Vblock Systems worldwide.

John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco, said, “VCE represents another example of Cisco’s strategy of aggressively investing to drive key market transitions.

“VCE was created to positively disrupt datacentre architectures utilising Cisco’s UCS and Nexus platforms, and we have been thrilled with the execution, results and customer demand the VCE team has delivered. I look forward to the next chapter of VCE’s evolution and Cisco’s continued commitment in VCE as a crucial route to market for Cisco’s next-generation technologies for the datacentre and cloud.”

Adds CVE CEO Praveen Akkiraju: “I am energised by this next phase as we apply the unique VCE Experience to enable customers’ journey to the cloud.”

Just under half (45 per cent) of UK businesses have no data analytics platform experience, according to recently published research.

The survey of 300 business and technical decision makers across the UK enterprise and the public sector revealed that, despite recognition of the big data opportunity, businesses in all sectors are struggling with skills and infrastructure challenges.

The study, carried out by Opinium Research on behalf of storage giant EMC, found that alongside the skills shortage, 42 per cent of all respondents feel IT infrastructure limitations are holding them back, with 44 per cent of financial services decision makers unable to alter their infrastructure fast enough to make better use of data.

The research found that 61 per cent of leaders identified driving new revenue streams as a major motivator for their big data projects, with the IT, telecoms and media sector ranking this highest. However, 67 per cent of retail sector leaders identified the potential to make more money and drive growth through data analysis as a key driver.

Worryingly, the survey found nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) are without the skills required to understand ethical, responsible and compliant use of customer data.

In the retail sector, almost two thirds (63 per cent) of decision makers in the industry feel better use of customer insights, trend data and information in and around their business will be key to unlocking the next wave of growth. Additionally, 74 per cent recognise that transforming their organisational model to meet customer requirements will play a fundamental role in preparing the business for growth.

One of the big shocks unearthed by the survey was that the financial services sector had the lowest scores across the board.

The sector as a whole appears to be struggling to align its infrastructure, skills and leadership with the opportunities of big data, the research said. Although 56 per cent of financial services decision makers recognised the potential to drive revenue streams and better understand customers, almost half revealed their IT infrastructure can't move fast enough to make better use of data.

James Petter, managing director of UK and Ireland at EMC, said the industry is "past the point where people can write off the potential for and use of data as the responsibility of IT or an operational silo".

"It has to be a strategic focus for the business if we are to successfully deliver a new era of accelerated growth in an uncertain, hyper-competitive market context," he said.

"It's great to see the majority of businesses across all sectors are embracing big data analytics of some kind, but there's clearly a long way to go before all businesses are equipped with the right skills, leadership and IT infrastructure to drive real change and new opportunities in their markets."

Analysists said that one-in-five businesses feel they have a problem with skills shortages.

"We also know that companies less than 10 years old are reaping significantly more value from analytics than their older counterparts," said Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Traditional companies need to get moving faster in the analytics uptake, or the gaps are going to widen."

The NHS faces an uncertain future unless steps are taken to make it easier for patients to access data, and for information to be shared with trustworthy third parties.

Speaking at the Leading the Technology Revolution event in central London yesterday, Tim Kelsey, national director for patients and information at NHS England, said the continuation of the NHS is dependent on making it easier for people to access health information.

"We have a very fragmented healthcare environment, we have some very significant financial pressures, and, I think, an unstoppable tide of public appetite to make more sense of digital information," said Kelsey.

"Seventy-six per cent of us now routinely use the internet, but only two per cent of us have ever engaged digitally with the NHS.

"These are two interesting statistics that hint that we have to embrace this future or we are very seriously going to not only be left behind, but put the NHS in real jeopardy," he added.

He said the fact the NHS Choices website, which was set up in 2007 to provide people with access to unbiased information about their health and well-being, is regularly visited by 30 million unique users a month highlights the demand for online access to this kind of data.

Changes are afoot to make this possible, Kelsey continued, including plans to make GP records accessible to patients online for the first time from the end of this financial year.

At present, if a person requires access to this information, they need to make a formal application to the manager of their GP surgery.

By making it easier for people to do this themselves, the hope is it will enable patients to get a better understanding of why they've been prescribed certain treatments, and help them make informed choices about how to preserve their own well-being.

Kelsey also reiterated that the postponed Care.data initiative will have a key part to play in this process, as well as in helping the scientific community glean greater insights into people's health.

The project, which aims to allow GPs to share anonymised patient data with hospitals, researchers and private companies, was temporarily shelved earlier this year over concerns not enough had been done to make people aware of it.

However, Kelsey said the project was in a "stronger" place than it was a few months ago, before declaring that it has the potential to be the greatest contribution "our generation makes to the sustainability of healthcare."

Kelsey made the comments at the launch of the Sustaining Universal Healthcare: Making Better Use of Information report by storage vendor EMC and Volterra, which sets out how better use of information can reportedly save the NHS between 16.5 billion and 66 billion a year.

This, the report claims, is essential to do as the health service is facing the prospect of a 34 billion funding shortfall by 2020.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) today announced Russell Poole is to replace Terry Beale as its head of channel for the UK and Ireland.

Poole joined EMC in 1999 to manage an Enterprise sales team, before heading up the EMC Consultancy sales business. In 2011 he took up the leadership role for EMC’s Service Provider business and then last year also took responsibility for the Public Sector organisation – both of which he will continue to head up in his new role.

Beale, meanwhile, has moved to a new role at EMC running the XtremeIO ‘all-flash array’ business across EMEA.

James Petter, senior VP and MD UK&I comments: “Russell has done a phenomenal job at EMC already. With significant shifts taking place in the market, his expertise will be crucial in ensuring our channel and partners continue to grow and become more profitable.”

EMC (NYSE:EMC) has appointed its first channel development manager for Scotland.

With 28 years’ experience in the Scottish IT sector, including roles with Dell, CommVault, Hitachi and NetApp, Mark Baur will be focused on securing new partners across Scotland in addition to supporting the vendor’s regional partner base.

According to Baur, there is “an immense amount of expertise across the channel landscape” in Scotland. He says: “Their knowledge of the needs of both local businesses and the major markets such as oil and gas make them key to the success of EMC in the region. My aim is to provide our partners with the support they need to make working with EMC as easy and profitable as possible.”

In recent years EMC has made an effort to be more channel-friendly, with an increasing percentage of its business now from indirect sales. In EMEA EMC claims 64 percent of its sales go solely through the channel, with 80 percent of deals “influenced” by the channel.

Martin Brown, EMC’s country manager for Scotland says: “We are delighted to have Mark on board, particularly given his extensive experience, drive and enthusiasm for contributing towards our growth targets in the Scottish marketplace. I’m confident he will make a significant impact on the team. We look forward to the success continuing over the coming months and years.”

Adds Terry Beale, head of channel EMC UK&I: “The channel is vital to EMC’s success across all of the UK and Scotland is a great example of that. We are working to both help our existing partners increase their strength in the market and expertise and also identify new niche partners that have traditionally held incredibly close ties with smaller business where our product portfolio is increasingly relevant.

“EMC is committed to increasing its relevance to this market and Marks’s appointment will be key in us achieving this in Scotland.”

At its recent EMC World event in Las Vegas, the vendor detailed its forthcoming Business Partner Programme (BPP), and revealed it was “bullish” about grabbing market share in 2014.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) kicked off its annual EMC World event in Las Vegas today by unveiling its new Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) appliance, which it claims offers up to 28 percent lower TCO than public cloud alternatives from Amazon and Google.

Formerly known as Project Nile, ECS includes block, object and HDFS capabilities in one appliance. It offers up to 2.9 Petabytes of storage in a single rack, and can be clustered to achieve Exabyte scale — a requirement for the ‘Third Platform of IT’, a concept relating to the mega trends of cloud, mobile, social and Big Data.

EMC says ECS provides customers with a solution which “eliminates the tradeoffs inherent within the public cloud” citing system outages, the costs of moving their data in and out of the public cloud environment and compliance issues.

“It is a complete, cloud scale storage system,” says EMC president of products and marketing, Jeremy Burton. “There are systems out there that deliver object, or block; this is one unified system that can serve up those different access vehicles.”

Burton says EMC it’s not just eyeing the enterprise as potential customers – it also envisions take-up among service providers who can use ECS to offer storage as a service. “It is an appliance; it is not an appliance service,” he says. “Think an Amazon S3 or an Amazon EBS in a box, up and running in minutes,” he explains.

“Our research tells us that mid-sized to large organisations are increasingly looking to leverage the cost and scale benefits of public cloud models, but on their own terms,” comments Simon Robinson, research vice president at 451 Research.

“With the announcement of the ECS appliance, EMC is providing an alternative approach that promises to bring hyper-scale efficiencies to on-premise and hybrid cloud deployments. We believe this kind of approach represents the future of enterprise storage infrastructure for cloud-based applications and workloads.”

So how does ECS stack up against the big public cloud providers? EMC reckons that despite the falling cost of cloud capacity, ECS delivers nine and 18 percent lower TCO in mainstream-sized (1.4 PB raw/740 TB utilised) customer implementations against Google and Amazon respectively; and 23 and 28 percent lower TCO in large-scale (11.5 PB raw/5.7 PB utilised) customer implementations.

The vendor says it is also planning to introduce new architecture and design services for the appliance. The services will help customers identify which of their current application workloads will drive the greatest business return with ECS, and will architect and design a system configuration accordingly. The services will be available with the general release of the ECS Appliance in the second quarter of 2014.

Elsewhere at the event EMC introduced a new version of the ViPR software platform it launched a year ago, providing additional block data services and geographic replication and distribution. It also provides support for commodity drives and additional third-party arrays through OpenStack.

It also announced it was bolstering its flash storage line with the acquisition of secretive Silcon Valley start-up DSSD, which specialises in server-based flash, although EMC is yet to provide much detail on the coupling as yet.

There’s been a shake-up at the top at Hitachi Data Systems that has seen VP, channels and alliances Neill Burton, ousted from the firm.

While rumours circulate as to the reasons behind the fallout, HDS has yet to provide official word on Burton’s departure. When asked for comment, the vendor released a statement just confirming HDS’ enterprise platform and software solutions director, Lynn Collier, has been appointed to the role of chief operating officer within the UK business.

It said: “Lynn’s appointment will elevate our focus on executing against a robust and effective partnering strategy. Lynn will also focus on leading sales enablement and productivity across both the direct and indirect routes to market.

“Lynn’s broad experience will help take our channel organisation to the next phase, where continuing to build close partner relationships and broadening our reach into new areas and markets is a priority for growth.

It then adds: “Neill Burton has been a valued member of the leadership team and has played a significant role in driving our partner strategy to date.”

Last month HDS announced former EMC exec Richard Gadd as its new managing director for the UK and Ireland.

Burton was unavailable yet for comment.

Avnet Technology Solutions (NYSE: AVT) has launched a programme aimed at promoting EMC storage and back-up devices designed for SMBs.

The Altitude initiative targets UK resellers of EMC’s range of VNXe storage solutions and Data Domain back-up products.

Avnet’s new Altitude programme consists of an online configuration tool that partners can use to calculate pricing for EMC products without the need to contact either Avnet or EMC. For example, if a reseller is with a customer who requests a price for a device to store data in a remote office, the partner can log onto Avnet’s Altitude portal to get a quote.

Lee Bushnell, EMC business manager at Avnet says the distributor is working with EMC to help partners “secure lucrative revenue streams by offering their customers uniform and attractive pricing options while eradicating the need for complex and time consuming proposals.”

He adds: “We believe the next 12 months will see a high level of growth in terms of companies leveraging existing network technology and adding storage functionality to their datacentre environments. The new Altitude portal will give Avnet business partners a distinct advantage in terms of speed of response to such opportunities.”

Partners will receive training on the new portal supported by a comprehensive range of sales collateral, data sheets and product training.

“Offering competitively-priced, high-performance storage and back-up devices for SMBs with minimum delay makes sound business sense,” comments Terry Beale, channel director at EMC. “We are confident that combining Avnet’s Altitude portal with its extensive network of business partners will deliver value and service throughout the channel.”

“In the SMB market things can move pretty quickly,” adds Nigel Tatlock, director of sales at reseller Enables IT. “Avnet’s Altitude portal gives us the toolset we need to speed up the whole quotation and deal registration procedure.”

Storage giant EMC has announced a raft of enhancements for its ViPR storage management platform, which it claims will cut big data processing times by up to 80 per cent.

The product, which was announced by EMC at its annual customer and partner conference last May and went on general release in September 2013, is a core component of the vendor's software-defined datacentre strategy.

It provides users with a self-service portal where they can view available storage resources, allowing them to provision the applications and services they need.

It also allows systems admins to pool resources from a variety of different storage arrays, including those made by rival vendors, and boasts support for standard APIs from the likes of Amazon Web Services, OpenStack and Atmos.

The vendor has now added to the product's functionality by enhancing its object storage capabilities through the inclusion of support for the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) in its ViPR 1.1 release.

This means IT managers can turn their existing storage infrastructure into a big data repository, allowing Hadoop analytics to be applied to any data that's under the control of ViPR.

Speaking to IT Pro, Chris Ratcliffe, vice president of marketing within EMC's advanced software division, said the inclusion of Hadoop support will have a huge impact on big data processing times.

This is because, rather than having to move their data somewhere else for processing, the HDFS enhancements allow the analysis to be carried out where the data already resides.

"For customers it's all about time to results with big data and this can reduce that by 70-to-80 per cent," he said.

Since ViPR made its debut, Ratcliffe said the product has been warmly received, and has even won over users that are new to EMC.

To ensure this momentum continues, the company has also confirmed the 1.0 version of the software will be available from today as a free download.

As well as the ViPR enhancements, the company has also overhauled its Storage Resource Management (SRM) product suite to make it easier for admins to manage multi-vendor storage environments.

In other EMC-related news, the vendor has confirmed that 1,000 jobs at the firm will be axed by the end of the current financial quarter.

The announcement follows the publication of EMC's latest financial results, which saw the firm post lower-than-expected revenue figures for the previous financial year.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) has recruited former Colt exec Simon Walsh as it’s new chief operating officer for EMEA.

Reporting to EMC’s EMEA president, Adrian McDonald, Walsh will be responsible for developing the company’s go-to-market strategy and workforce across the region.

Walsh had held the post of executive VP at Colt, and was a member of the Executive Committee with responsibility for the Pan-European enterprise division. Prior to this, he was MD at Computacenter UK Ltd.

“I am looking forward to working with EMC’s talented and passionate team in the EMEA region – and the timing is perfect,” says Walsh.

“2014 is set to see unprecedented change in the technology industry as we move from one era of computing to the next, which will be built on mobile, social networking, cloud services and Big Data analytics technologies. Our job is to help our customers manage this challenge and redefine the delivery of IT so that it becomes a truly competitive advantage to their business.

“In this dynamic but exciting context, EMC has big aspirations for 2014 and I look forward to making my own contributions to our customers’ success over the months ahead.”

NetApp has shared its technology roadmap and revealed plans to steal ahead of its competitors in the burgeoning flash market.

Speaking at NetApp's three-day Insight EMEA conference in Dublin this week, director of technology and strategy, Matt Watts, reflected on how best to handle operations that have now become "low value, commodity IT".

Touching on the storage vendor's focus on flash and cloud as well as the increasing role of IT as a "services broker", Watts highlighted how far the role of storage has come from its humble beginnings within the IT hierarchy.

"If you look at our portfolio and the impact of flash, the storage guy is more significant than ever before," said Watts during a press preview of his keynote speech.

"We are in the same business as utility companies, really. We take data which has no value on its own and we store and deliver it to the end point where the ones and zeros become useful. We have more tools, technologies and capabilities than before, we have the ability to truly make a difference to the business. In the future, I'm going to say it loud and proud: I am the storage guy'!"

Underlining NetApp's focus on flash-accelerated and cloud-integrated storage systems, the vendor announced two new storage platforms at the event, including an all-flash array and an updated platform.

All-flash

The vendor's EF550 all-flash array, succeeding the EF540, targets the traditional big-money, big-footprint tier-1 storage environment traditionally inhabited by the likes of EMC and IBM.

Though flash is considered expensive on a capacity-basis, the company is banking its cheaper cost on a per IOPS basis to provide an attractive alternative to the traditional spinning disk storage needs of systems like databases and CRM tools.

"I believe all-flash can be used in a number of different, disruptive ways," said Watts. "The biggest disruption will be caused to the traditional large frame-type storage array, where customers are buying large amounts of capacity but not using it because they are using a smaller amount of lots of disk' to get I/O.

"Our system, delivering over 450,000 IOPs and under 1 millisecond latency, costs typically less than 10 per cent of the cost of the 7-figure large frame storage array from a typical vendor. With a 2 RU form factor, it can outperform a system that consumes two whole racks and often lies under-used."

The company sees this product as an opportunity to break into the higher sphere storage world and to take on companies like EMC and IBM, whose bread and butter is tier 1 storage. It is relying on its strong foothold in the flash market where it has had a presence dating back to 2008 to beat the numerous start-ups and the big vendors that are emerging on the scene.

The new E-Series arrays include the E2700 SAN array, aimed at the remote office or smaller scale environment and offering a performance boost on its predecessor. "It's very high density," explained Watts. "It has the most dense storage shelf of any technology today." The updated E5500 SAN array also steps up the performance on its predecessor, as a dedicated on-premise main storage environment with basic data management capabilities.

Cloud

NetApp is addressing cloud integration by expanding the scope of the ONTAP platform. Users can now run ONTAP as a virtual storage appliance within VMware environments and on a wider array of hardware than before.

"People want to deploy it into a cloud provider, where you don't necessarily know what the underlying hardware is. We are expanding the scope of what ONTAP can run on significantly so people can deploy it into some of the larger service providers we work with," commented Watts.

A mention was also made of the company's Project Shift, now in beta, which aims to allow platform and hypervisor independence across service providers. Overall, NetApp sees hybrid cloud as being the model of the future, using Data ONTAP as a universal data platform to provide cloud management across various mixes of private and public cloud.

Last week, the company posted results for its second fiscal 2014 quarter which ended on October 25 that were lower than what analysts expected but still showed an increase of one per cent on last year.

When SMBs come to review their printing needs, cost is no longer the only issue on their agenda. Today, there are two other important considerations which come high on the list and help deliver important cost savings for the business.

In a recent white paper, SMB Buying Considerations for Smarter Business Printing, October 2012, sponsored by OKI Europe, analyst IDC identifies that environmental considerations remain high on the agenda.

Energy usage in particular is a significant issue, with almost half (46 percent) of European SMBs who responded to IDC’s 2011 SMB Hardcopy Survey identifying it as a major concern. So a reduction in energy consumption is an important priority for SMBs – and this will also have positive financial implications for businesses.

Measures to save energy within businesses can be very simple, for example ensuring that for everyday work, double-sided printing is the default option. Energy can be saved by turning printers off at night but in our experience at OKI, this often does not happen within businesses. In a recent survey we ran into the views and opinions of more than 2,000 office workers across all business sizes, 61 percent of respondents said that no-one in their office was responsible for this small, quick task.

Other green issues identified by the IDC Hardcopy Survey included the availability of hardware and consumable recycling programmes, the use of recycled paper and the need to reduce packaging. An IDC IT and Sustainability End User Survey from September 2011 found that nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of SMEs said that functionality such as duplex and reduced energy consumption were already part of their organisation’s green IT policy.

Environmental pressures are also increasing all the time. The European Union Energy-using Products (EuP) directive, which came into force in January 2013, requires all new print devices to incorporate additional energy-saving features such as ‘auto off’ mode, shutting down the device when its primary feature has not been in use for a certain amount of time.

Of course, in our view at OKI, all organisations, including SMBs, can significantly cut the paper and energy costs plus the environmental impact of all the printing just be developing and managing a print strategy. 27 percentof respondents to our own OKI survey said that their company had such a policy in place that was being actively enforced.

Getting more for your money

With space often at a premium within SMBs, the footprint of the device becomes key to the purchasing decision Though more versatile than their smaller counterparts, the value of earlier A3 devices was limited by the fact that they took up significantly more space and were significantly more expensive.

The latest designs now mean that the footprint of today’s A3 printers are only marginally greater than those of a typical A4. Printers with A3 functionality are also today typically much more affordable – and so purchasing them is now for the first time a serious option for many SMBs.

Secure printing

Security too continues to be a matter of concern for SMBs. Another IDC study, entitled The Importance of IT for Business Enablement Among Western European Vertical Markets in 2012, found that data protection ranked highest in importance on the ‘to do’ list of initiatives for European firms.

This issue is likely to grow in importance as more flexible working puts greater demands on the need for secure remote access to corporate networks. We are already seeing ever greater numbers of employees expecting to connect to office printers from their own smartphones and tablets. In the OKI survey, 24 percent of respondents said they brought their own phones and tablets into the office – and of these a substantial 45 percent print from these devices on the office printer. It clearly highlights the potential scale of the security problem all businesses face.

In meeting this challenge, print security software can play a key role in keeping company data safe. A growing number of SMBs are adopting options like digital document capture and storage solutions together with document security including user ID in order to help manage print devices.

Security packages ensure stringent authentication and restriction of access, as well as PIN protection so that sensitive documents can only be printed when the user enters their PIN or swipes their ID card. Document encryption also makes sure that documents sent across the network are kept secure until they are printed.

The good news is that, printing solutions vendors like OKI Systems are addressing these issues, so the best of today’s print products have taken a significant step forward in enabling businesses to print greener and more securely – and at lower cost.

Graham Lowes is marketing director at OKI Systems (UK)

EMC has stepped up its war of words with rival Pure Storage by filing a lawsuit against the firm accusing it of stealing its trade secrets.

The storage behemoth has been embroiled in a series of legal spats recently with at least six former members of staff who it has accused of taking confidential company information with them when they left EMC to work at Pure Storage.

However, rather than just sue the employees themselves, EMC has now decided to take the fight to its Flash array making rival, and filed a lawsuit against Pure Storage with the US District Court of Massachusetts.

In the 48-page suit, the company accuses its competitor of colluding with former EMC staffers to misappropriate confidential company information and trade secrets totalling "tens of thousands" of pages.

"The activities advanced and directed by Pure Storage are part of a systematic and unlawful strategy intended to identify, target and convert valuable EMC assets for Pure Storage's benefit as [it] seems to brand itself as an innovator' in the enterprise storage market, apparently as part of its pre-IPO strategy," the document alleges.

The strongly worded document claims the alleged activities were "orchestrated or known to" the senior management team at Pure Storage, some of who are reported to be former EMC and VMware employees or investors.

"EMC competes vigorously and lawfully in the marketplace and expects indeed embraces the same conduct from its competitors," the suit continues.

"Unfortunately, rather than attempt to compete legitimately with EMC, Pure Storage has improperly obtained and benefited from critically sensitive EMC confidential information from former EMC employees," it adds.

This information is alleged to have been used to "target and raid with unnatural precision" EMC's bank of technical and sales staff, and allow Pure Storage to "unlawfully interfere" with the firm's long-standing customer relationships.

Since August 2011, it is claimed at least 44 EMC technical engineers and sales staff have left under "suspicious circumstances" to work for Pure Storage.

"In many instances, these individuals were among the highest performing EMC professionals in their positions in either the entire nation or in their assigned regions," the lawsuit states.

"Legitimate hiring in the open market would not result in such overwhelming recruitment of high-achieving employees from a single company."

The company also revealed it has sent cease and desist letters to former EMC employees and Pure Storage, and also took steps to remind the former about the agreements they made with the firm about not passing on confidential information to competitors once they leave.

"Because Pure Storage's unlawful activity has continued unabated despite EMC's prior efforts, [it] brings this action seeking relief that will finally put a stop [to] the underhanded conduct being orchestrated by Pure Storage and its executives, and to seek full redress for the harm this conduct has caused EMC," the documents adds.

Pure Storage has responded to the lawsuit by rubbishing EMC's claims in a blog post, claiming there is "no merit whatsoever to any of these complaints."

The post, written by Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen, also states the firm intends to "vigorously" defend itself against EMC's allegations.

"We believe in employee freedom and in hiring the very best, but at the same time, we have a strong policy against the use of any third party confidential information," Dietzen wrote.

"To do otherwise would be to compromise our core values of employee freedom and hiring the very best candidates that seek to join us."

EMC has accused several ex-employees of taking confidential company information with them when they defected to rival firm Pure Storage.

The storage giant has embarked on legal action against a number of former employees, who it claims have "wrongfully taken confidential and competitively sensitive" information about EMC's operations when they have gone to work for the competitor.

US-based Pure Storage specialises in the manufacture of all-Flash storage arrays, and has been steadily establishing a presence in the UK since the start of the year.

The most recent lawsuit was filed on Monday at the US District Court in Boston, and involves former EMC partner sales manager, Chadwick Johnson, who worked at the firm from February 2006 to September 2013.

He is accused of using his last 48 hours as an EMC employee to "surreptitiously" access several company files on his laptop from two external storage devices that were not returned to the company at the time of his departure.

These files included a report containing the names, purchase histories and deal values of thousands of EMC customers, and a competitive selling guide that details how employees should go about pitting the vendor's Flash storage products against Pure Storage's competing offerings.

Several other documents, including one containing details of EMC's customer, partner and employee relationships and another showing the types of storage products EMC users bought, were also allegedly accessed by Johnson during his final two days at the firm.

"Jonson was entrusted with competitively sensitive, confidential business information developed and used by EMC...that would be valuable to an EMC competitor, such as Pure Storage," the suit states.

It then goes on to claim Johnson's actions are part of a larger campaign, involving "numerous" former EMC staff members, waged by Pure Storage to give it an "unfair" competitive edge over its rival.

"[The former staff have been] misappropriating EMC's Confidential Information and Property, unlawfully soliciting EMC's customers and raiding EMC of its valuable employees, all in an effort to increase Pure Storage's presence in the marketplace at the expense of EMC," the document continues.

"Since last year, no fewer than 30 high-performing employees have departed EMC under suspicious circumstances to join Pure Storage," it added.

As such, it seems the case against Johnson is just the tip of the iceberg, as the document confirms his one of a number of suits the firm is pursuing against former employees that have defected to Pure Storage.

"EMC has been forced to initiate litigation seeking declaratory relief and preliminary and permanent injunctive relief to enjoin its former employees from continuing to process EMC property, from using or disseminating EMC property, and from unlawfully soliciting EMC employees and customers," it states.

EMC has reaffirmed its commitment to Flash storage and talked up converged infrastructure and big data as its big bets for the future at its annual EMC Forum event in London.

"We think Flash storage is going to...and already is having a profound impact [on] the storage industry," said Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of product operations, solutions and marketing, during his keynote yesterday.

"Why is that? ... You get dramatic reductions in latencies. If you look at your average performance hard drive, you've got a couple of milliseconds in terms of latency. With a PCIe card in the server, you are down to 100 microseconds," he added.

However, while Burton lauded the much lower latencies associated with Flash storage, he also acknowledged the capital outlay for the technology is much higher.

But, he argued, Flash offered much better value for money up to 50 times more dollar per IOPs than with a standard hard drive, justifying the initial expense.

Burton revealed the company will be releasing XtremIO, an all-Flash array that initially began shipping to selected customers in March 2013, to general availability before the end of 2013.

"This really is a specialised weapon," he said. "Because of its architecture, whether this array is empty or full, whether it's idle or busy, you're going to get sustained half-millisecond response times."

EMC acquired Flash storage specialist XtremIO in May 2012 for $430 million (266 million at the time), before it had started shipping any technology to customers. It appears the acquisition caused something of a lag in the technology's release as it had been expected to start shipping before the end of last year.

A further market trend identified by Burton is converged infrastructure.

"[If] the market for converged infrastructure...is not on your radar right now, my prediction [is that] in the next few years it will be," he told delegates.

"It is expected to grow 40 per cent...over the next four years in contrast to the two per cent growth for the individual components. So again, it is a trend that is on the up and we see these cloud building blocks' - server, storage and network - becoming increasingly deployed not just in IT departments but in service providers as well," Burton said.

Big Data was another of the event's key themes, with much of the discussion focusing on its use within companies, as well as practical questions around storage and analysis.

According to a survey carried out by EMC for the conference, 75 per cent of 455 IT decision makers said their organisation could be improved with better use of data and 37 per cent agreed their senior teams trust Big Data insights to make transformative business decisions.

A further 21 per cent claimed to have achieved a competitive advantage through the use of Big Data analytics, while 44 per cent said they thought the industries using these tools will be successful in the future.

However, 48 per cent said a lack of a clear business case or proven ROI was stopping them from adopting a Big Data strategy.

At a media roundtable at the Forum, Burton said this was likely because the business teams within their organisations do not understand what Big Data is.

"Until a business really internalises [what Big Data is] and understands the impact it can have and puts some people looking at what it can do, then this thing is like a hammer looking for a nail," said Burton.

"They've heard about it and they think it sounds good, but they don't know what they can do with it."

Burton added the 21 per cent who had already claimed to have gained a competitive advantage were the early adopters but the rest would follow in the coming years or be left behind.

EMC has confirmed its pooled storage management tool ViPR will enter general availability later this month, as part of the firm's push to help customers build web-scale datacentres.

The product was first unveiled by the storage giant at its EMC World conference in Las Vegas earlier this year, and is a core component of the vendor's software-defined datacentre strategy.

It provides users with a self-service portal where they can view available storage resources, allowing them to provision the applications and services they need.

It also allows users to pool resources from a variety of different storage arrays, including those made by rival vendors, and boasts support for standard APIs from the likes of Amazon Web Services, OpenStack and Atmos.

The product will be available to buy on 27 September, with EMC offering evaluation copies from 1 January 2014.

The product's automation element has repeatedly been flagged by EMC as an important part of its push to help enterprises build out large-scale datacentres, similar to those employed by consumer cloud companies like Facebook and Google.

Speaking at the vendor's Speed2Lead event in Milan, Italy, Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of product operations and marketing, said it should also reduce the amount of manpower required to build a datacentre on that kind of scale.

"We think it's going to enable folks, regardless of whether they're in an IT department or a service provider, to build a web-scale storage infrastructure without hiring thousands of techies to do it," he explained.

It was also suggested the product's release date was several months earlier than many were expecting.

The vendor's Speed2Lead event centres on the work EMC is doing to help enterprises take advantage of industry megatrends cloud, big data and mobile.

As well as the ViPR announcement, the company also used the event to announce the expansion of its mid-range family of VNX unified storage arrays that the company claims deliver huge performance and efficiency benefits.

It has also set out plans to be the first to market with a complete web-scale storage infrastructure for the datacentre, an initiative it has codenamed Project Nile.

EMC has expanded its VNX mid-range family of unified storage arrays to include Flash-optimised systems based on Intel's multi-core Sandy Bridge technology.

The company claims the new systems can be used to deploy six times the number of virtual machines compared to the previous generation of VNX arrays, making it more cost effective for end users to take advantage of virtualisation.

The systems also offer four times the performance of the other members of the VNX family, EMC added, at a third of the price of the previous generation.

This is made possible, in part, by the inclusion of EMC's Multi-Core Optimisation software (MCx), which can be used to speed up virtualised applications.

Speaking at the storage firm's Speed2Lead launch event in Milan, Italy, Rich Napolitano, president of the unified storage division at EMC, confirmed the new additions to the VNX range are shipping now.

"This new platform really is revolutionary...It's [a] unified [storage system], so it's block and file. It's tuned to take advantage of Flash and [delivers] a huge number of IOPs per second at extremely low latency," he said.

Further to this, the company also took the wraps off an all-Flash version of the VNX to support users that require consistently fast performing storage, before confirming the VNX will soon form part of its VSPEX reference architecture product.

The latter was announced by the company in 2012, and traditionally consists of EMC storage and backup, as well as virtualisation, server and networking technology from the likes of Brocade, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, VMware and Citrix.

The inclusion of VNX will allow the system to support 1,000 virtual machines, EMC claims, which twice the number of workloads it could handle before.

David Goulden, president and chief operating officer of EMC, said multi-core technology, Flash and virtualisation will all play an important role in helping enterprises cope with the demands imposed on them by big data.

"The question should be [in the big data era] how are datacentres going to handle this massive growth in information, because it's not slowing down. The answer to this question is you have to leverage...multi-core technology," he told delegates.

Also, with the price of Flash storage falling all the time, it's becoming even easier for enterprises to adopt it, Goulden added.

"Flash storage is disruptive, it's still much more expensive, but it offers exceptional technology," he said.

"The price difference is coming down, so there are many more use cases where you can justify Flash technology."

Storage giant EMC has reportedly made moves on another Middle Eastern storage startup, by offering between $200-300 million to acquire Scale IO.

According to sources quoted in a report on Israeli news site Calcalist, the deal is in the pipeline, but at the time of writing - neither party would comment on a prospective acquisition.

If the speculation turns out to be true, ScaleIO will be the second storage startup EMC has acquired in recent years, after it splashed out on flash storage player XtremIO in 2012.

It would also mark another move by the vendor into the storage management software space.

In this vein, at last month's EMC World conference in Las Vegas, the vendor took the wraps off its ViPR Controller, which is designed to provide IT administrators with a self-service portal where they can view the storage resources they have available to provision applications and services.

EMC has been heavily investing in the Israel for some time now, having acquired several firms in the country. It also opened a research and development centre there in 2011.

The ScaleIO software allows users to group together and pool server storage so that it can be managed in the same way as a virtual SAN.

The company was set up in 2011, and counts Greylock and Norwest Venture Partners among its financial backers.

IT Pro contacted EMC for comment on this story, but was told they do not comment on rumour or speculation.

EMC has set its sights on leading the flash storage market, declaring its plans for the technology as its "must not fail" objective for 2013.

The storage giant has been gradually building out its flash product portfolio in recent years, through the launch of its Project Lightning initiative, which was unveiled at EMC World in 2011, and its acquisition of flash vendor XtremIO last year.

Speaking to IT Pro, David Nicolson, chief strategist of EMC's flash storage division, said the company was looking at deploying the technology throughout the infrastructure stack.

At the moment, the company's flash portfolio consists of hybrid and all-flash storage arrays, and servers featuring its PCIe card technology.

"Our executives have listed flash as the number one must not fail initiative for 2013, and we really are seeing it becoming ubiquitous, in that it will eventually be everywhere, in all parts of the infrastructure," said Nicolson.

"That's not to be confused with the idea that all data will live on flash, as we don't believe that. As far as we can see into the future, there will be a mix of media [spinning disk and flash] that will be appropriate for a variety of data types," he added.

EMC's activity in the market has ruffled a few feathers, with several flash storage vendors including Fusion-IO and Pure Storage openly attacking the firm's flash plans in the past.

However, Nicolson said the animosity of its flash rivals is of no great concern to EMC, although that's not to say the firm does not keep close tabs on what the other runners and riders in the market are up to.

"Part of EMC's ability to innovate is to look at the great ideas the start-up community has come up with and compare them to one another...and we do a lot of due diligence, board investment and digging in to see what the best move is for every piece of the technology stack," he said.

"Do we engineer it ourselves or do we acquire and innovate, is the big question...and in the case of all-flash arrays we made a strategic investment in XtremIO as we felt they were the best of the pack out there," Nicolson added.

In the face of competitive threats from other members of the flash storage community, Nicolson said very few boast the breadth of products EMC has or the financial backing.

"Do we see other start-ups as a threat? Yeah, absolutely, and that's what keeps us agile and [keeps us going] so our customers benefit. Everyone benefits from that kind of competition," he said.

"And we think we're well poised in the face of that competition, because in the case of some of our small competitors they tend to focus on one piece of the infrastructure stack.

"We definitely salute the pioneers and, in some cases, have had the benefit of learning from some of their mistakes," he concluded.

EMC has revealed further details about the aims and objectives of its new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company, Pivotal, and the role it will play in solving big data problems in the enterprise.

Pivotal is partly owned by EMC, VMware and General Electric (GE), and began trading as a standalone entity last month.

Speaking at the EMC World conference in Las Vegas, EMC CEO Joe Tucci told attendees that Pivotal will be the platform needed to create cloud agnostic applications that will help users make sense of their unstructured data.

"In the enterprise, unstructured data is three times as big as your structured data and is growing five times as fast, and yet most companies base their business decisions only on their structured data," said Tucci.

The amount of data businesses will have to wade through is set to skyrocket, he warned, as the number of devices that connect to the internet increases over time.

"Sensors are being built into everything you can imagine...and everyone has a cellphone in their pocket. But instead of coming at typing speeds, [this data will be] coming in at machine speeds, which means you not only have to ingest huge amounts of data, but huge amounts of data very quickly," he said.

"When you think of that [on a] petabyte scale, you're going to need to build these applications in a new way...[using] modern programming tools, data fabrics and the cloud," added Tucci.

This taps into another trend EMC has flagged a number of times at this year's event, which is the rise of the third application platform, which IT Pro reported on yesterday.

The first application platform revolved around the use of mainframes, while the second platform is the term used to describe PC and client server-type applications.

"As we moved from platform one to platform two there [were] 21 companies with over a billion dollar market cap and the only one that made it successfully to platform two was IBM," said Tucci.

"We're now having the same transition from platform two to platform three...and the companies that are prominent on platform two [will] become much less so and [we'll see] new companies come to great prominence."

Many businesses currently run mission critical applications on the second platform, said Tucci, and an important part of Pivotal's work will centre on helping companies correct this.

"To address this we created Pivotal...[and] when we build these next generation apps, they will run very slickly on the VMware cloud, but these same applications will have app portability and run on Amazon Web Services, Azure and Openstack," added Tucci. "Isn't that a great way to build an application?"

Former VMware chief Paul Maritz is overseeing Pivotal's operations, and during his part of the keynote said these applications will make it easier for companies to make sense of the "big and fast" data they receive from multiple sources.

"Not only is the number of things attached to the internet going to increase by two orders of magnitude, but these devices will create information that needs to be made sense of," said Maritz.

"We need to provide businesses [with applications to] analyse data at rest and fast data," he concluded.

EMC and VMware will cut a total of 1,804 jobs, as the firms aim to carry out a restructuring plans during the course of 2013.

EMC disclosed the information in its quarterly 10-Q report, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"In the first quarter of 2013, EMC implemented restructuring programs to create further operational efficiencies which will result in a workforce reduction of 1,004 positions," it was noted in the filing.

EMC's subsidiary VMware cited similar reasoning for job cuts.

"In the first quarter of 2013, VMware implemented a plan to streamline its operations in order to focus its business on strategic areas it has determined to be most compelling. The plan includes the elimination of approximately 800 positions across all major functional groups and geographies."

The cuts come despite favorable first quater earnings for both EMC and VMware. EMC posted Q1 revenue of $5.39 billion, up 6 per cent annually. VMware generated revenue of 1.19 billion, up 13 per cent year-on-year.

The news comes midway through the firms annual EMC World conference in Las Vegas where the storage vendor has released a slew of products including management software.

The restructuring programs are intended to "further operational efficiencies" and are expected to be completed by the end of 2013.

Storage giant EMC has hailed the emergence of an object storage-based platform that will underpin the rollout of a new generation of cloud-based applications.

This "third platform" theme was touched on by several speakers on the first day of EMC World in Las Vegas, the storage vendor's annual worldwide partner and customer event.

The phrase was originally coined by market watcher IDC, who used it to describe the "convergence of disruptive IT trends" such as mobile, cloud services, mobile broadband networks, big data analytics and social technologies.

This will result in the creation of new cloud-hosted applications, accessed primarily through mobile devices that will be used by millions of people, it was claimed at the event.

According to figures quoted by EMC, there were around six million of these types of applications in 2012, a figure that is expected to rise to around 48 million by 2016.

David Goulden, chief operating officer and president of EMC, briefly discussed the trend during the opening keynote of EMC World 2013.

He said most of the applications we use today, from the likes of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, are built on the so-called "second platform", and based on older programming languages.

"How organisations tap into that [third platform] opportunity, [will need to be done] in a way that allows them to leverage their existing technology investments. That is going to be key," he added.

Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of product operations and marketing at EMC, keenly stressed during a separate media presentation that these second generation apps will still be with us for a long time to come.

In fact, according to the same set of figures trotted out by EMC, the number of second platform applications is expected to grow from 83 million in 2012 to 141 million in 2016.

"Most people in IT these days, their businesses have been built on this second platform," he said.

"Now, we don't see the second platform going away any time soon, but over the next couple of years we [will see a] new platform and ecosystem emerging called the third platform.

"The opportunity and challenge [for businesses] is to be relevant in the world of the third platform," he added.

Former VMware CEO Paul Maritz, who was recently installed as the chief executive of EMC-backed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) player Pivotal, also flagged the notion of the third platform during the opening keynote.

"Everything we do is in support of applications [because] they're what deliver the experience to customers, enable new business models," said Maritz.

"We're about to see a golden age of new generation of applications that will allow amazing things to be done," he concluded.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) is to drop its Velocity partner programme in favour of a new brand that all partners will use going to market, EMC Business Partner.

“We are introducing a newly-branded partner programme that leverages the power of EMC…The name Velocity goes away. You will all market yourself as EMC Business Partners with all the clout of EMC behind you,” SVP of global channel sales, Gregg Ambulos, told EMC’s top partners during the channel keynote at EMC World in Las Vegas today.

Ambulos says the re-branding, which will come into effect on January 1, 2014, is just the start of a process to make working with EMC “simpler, more predictable and more profitable”, promising more announcements in the months to come.

The vendor has a made notable effort in recent years to improve its once-strained relationship with its partners – and it appears to be paying off.

“You are the centre of our universe,” Ambulos told partners, revealing that the channel now represents more than 50 percent of EMC revenues.

(In fact, EMC’s president of global sales, Bill Scannell, later quoted the figure as being closer to 60 percent, if service providers were added to the mix.)

Encouragingly for the UK channel, Scannell said 74 percent of business in Europe went through partners in Q4, with a target set now of 80 percent.

Last year EMC announced it was to hand over a chunk of its direct enterprise business to the channel. Updating partners today, Ambulos said the firm “opened up thousands of accounts in the enterprise space and the results have been absolutely stellar.”

While chairman and CEO Joe Tucci said EMC had no hard target for further growing the channel’s share of business, he conceded a further increase was “an inevitable part of the plan.”

Elsewhere today, EMC’s SVP of strategic sales, alliances and service providers, Terry Breen, garnered applause from the audience when he revealed the firm would be ditching its PowerLink system and replacing it with a brand new partner portal. “We are committed to giving you what you need to make doing business with us simple and successful,” he said.

EMC and VMware spin-off Pivotal has officially begun trading as a standalone entity and fleshed out details about its new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

Pivotal was initially formed through a collaboration between tech giants VMware and EMC, but has now established itself as an independent company.

VMware and EMC are still listed as investors in the firm, along with power company General Electric (GE).

The company boasts around 1,250 staff and is headed up by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

The firm took the wraps off its Pivotal One PaaS platform yesterday, which will allow developers to create cloud-independent applications using big data tools, new programming frameworks and cloud architectures.

In a statement, Maritz said Pivotal's aim is to tap into customer demands for new products that will provide real-time insights into their data.

"There is a widespread need emerging for new solutions that allow customers to drive new business value by cost-effectively reasoning over large datasets, ingesting information that is rapidly arriving from multiple sources, writing applications that allow real-time reactions, and doing all of this in a cloud-independent or portable manner," he said.

"The need for these solutions can be found across a wide range of industries and it is our belief that these solutions will drive the need for new platforms. Pivotal aims to be a leading provider of such a platform."

In a research note, market watcher Gartner said the type of applications Pivotal is targeting include those offered by the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce.com.

"Pivotal's declared mission is to democractise these innovations and make them available to enterprise IT architects and innovative ISVs," wrote Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

However, Natis claimed the company was missing a couple of "notable components" that are essential for the creation of a "comprehensive" cloud computing platform.

"There is no integration technology...integration of data, applications, cloud and web services, partners and event streams is an essential element of such an environment," said Natis.

"Considerable functionality will have to be developed, acquired and integrated into the platform before it can claim victory," he added.

US-vendor Pure Storage has marked its launch in EMEA by pouring scorn on EMC's flash storage plans, while ruling itself out of becoming the flash market's next takeover target.

The company specialises in the manufacture of all-flash storage arrays, and claims it can offer the technology at a price comparable to what end users spend on mechanical disk-based storage.

Up to now, the firm has focused on building out its presence in the US, but recently opened an HQ over here and has set its sights on winning over UK enterprise customers.

Speaking to IT Pro, Scott Dietzen, CEO of Pure Storage, set out the firm's UK growth ambitions.

"Usually companies in this space are benchmarked [for growth] against NetApp and Data Domain, as each of them grew by an order of 40 per cent sequentially [from launch]," he claimed.

"We're out of the gate faster and growing faster than they did...and that's our expectation for every market that we enter."

The Flash market is an area that storage veteran EMC has made an effort to move into of late, through its acquisition of Xtrem-io last year and the subsequent release of its new Flash storage line.

However, Dietzen claims EMC is playing catch up with the rest of the flash storage market, and estimates his firm has an 18-month technology lead on its rival.

"EMC bought the start-up competitor closest to Pure in terms of architecture [Xtrem-io], but we believe we have an 18-month technology lead [on the]. They have a good team, though, so obviously the race is on," he said.

"We don't see anyone else in the market that's nearly as close to having the full recipe that we've launched with."

But that's not to say the company is resting on its laurels, he added, as there is still the possibility that another new entrant could emerge that leaves both firms for dust.

"It's entirely possible, but the hurdles to get into the market are on a par with the ones [vendors must overcome] to take on VMware, who've had a very nice run. Right now, though, we're starting to see other offerings that are [getting closer to VMware] technically," he said.

To mark Pure Storage's launch in EMEA, the company has taken the wraps off its "Love Your Storage" money-back guarantee programme, which will see the firm reimburse customers who expressed disappointment in the performance and reliability of its all-flash arrays, for example.

"We believe we have the best technology in the space and we will give you your money back if we don't exceed all of your expectations in that regard," Dietzen added.

He was also keen to stress the firm has no plans to follow Xtrem-io's lead and get itself acquired, claiming the company's growth to date means it should have no problem maintaining its status as an independent storage vendor.

"We've had numerous requests for M&A conversations. There was a bidding war for Xtrem-IO and all of the bidders talked to us before and after to express their interest, but we want to build an independent storage company," he explained.

"The rationale behind that is because we think we can do a better job serving customers as an independent than by joining a bigger company...who may put a block on us approaching customers where they have [long-standing] disk contracts."