Could EMC Become The Amdahl of Cloud Storage?

There is no doubt that EMC has shipped some Atmos storage since its introduction. Yes, EMC has Atmos. And the company claims that Atmos is specifically designed for the cloud. However, I believe that there are fundamental issues with the way EMC sells Atmos to customers. First of all, if Atmos is cloud storage, then it should be sold on a usage basis. Customers should be charged only for what they use--not for petabytes of capacity up front. After all, isn't that the whole premise of cloud? Lowering your capital expenditures and shifting to a utility model? It makes me wonder if EMC is slowly becoming the Amdahl of Cloud Storage.

EMC appears reluctant to embrace the utility model, in my opinion, for fear of rapid margin compression. Instead, the company is touting its "cloud" storage to customers much the same way it touted "information lifecycle management" (ILM) storage, storage for "hyper-consolidation" and "information plants," among other marketing badges it affixed to its products. It's demanding payment for all Atmos storage capacity up front before dropping it on your data center floor.

While this approach will still work for some direct attached storage (DAS), (storage area network) SAN and (network-attached storage) NAS implementations, cloud storage utility architectures are a different animal. Moving customers to a cloud environment doesn't mean you apply the same sales and pricing principles of Symmetrix.

It doesn't mean you still charge customers maintenance fees and expect a tech refresh purchase every 18 to 24 months. EMC could be installing Atmos at customer sites and managing and charging for it as a cloud storage service--but it's not.

And with this type of aging sales approach, one has to wonder: Is EMC on a slow trajectory to effectively becoming the Amdahl of Cloud Storage?For those who don't know, Amdahl doesn't exist anymore. The company evaporated after trying to push the same old approach on customers for far too long. And if EMC doesn't change its ways as it wanders in the cloud, its journey there may be short-lived.

In addition to the wrong cloud sales strategy, there is the question of whether Atmos can truly scale beyond millions of objects--when billions are required in the cloud, not just millions.

Combine all that with the fact that that the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure and Nirvanix are all advancing the storage-as-a-service model to customers at an increasingly rapid pace, and Analytico is left to wonder if EMC and its investors are in for a rude awakening and may experience a bumpy ride in the cloud.

At the time this blog was written none of the vendors discussed were clients of Tom Trainer, or Analytico.