Having recently seen Pixar’s brilliant animation film Inside Out, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the five fascinating emotions featured in the film and those that affect an enterprise customer’s buying decision, especially when investing in a technology that is as disruptive as software defined. Inside Out takes a refreshing peek inside the human brain where 5 personified emotions – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust – live in a control room and drive rational responses. It is interesting to see how these emotions can be applied to the software-defined changes taking place today in the storage industry and how EMC® ScaleIO® fares in this evolving market.
Joy & Sadness: Let’s face it! In an
enterprise storage setting, Joy equals big bucks – either earned in gross revenue or in cost savings. Just as Joy acts as the prime driver of the personality in the film, all business decisions are driven by a subliminal urge to maximize profit and/or minimize cost. But sometimes the urge for excessive joy overlooks other subtleties in decision making, such as choosing a free, open source solution over a paid but high-performance alternative. An overemphasis on profit or cost reduction has the tendency of skewing away from the strategic trade-off point that gives the optimal returns for your business. As the film evolves into its third act, Joy eventually realizes that Sadness actually performs the critical function of restoring our emotional balance, a key ingredient for decision making. Likewise, as organizations expand and data requirements in terms of capacity and IOPS explode, CTOs and CIOs have to realize that there’s no single magic bullet for their constantly growing storage problems. No one articulates this more effectively than Randy Bias in his insightful take on the charade of ‘unified storage’. Put simply, if you want high performance and scalability, what you need is not a Swiss army knife, but a solution that is optimized and purpose-built for that specific requirement. ScaleIO, which is designed to deliver optimized performance and scalability from commodity servers, plays that role to a hilt.
Anger: The fiery redhead character stays true to its name, acting as a stimulus whenever it sees injustice being meted out. Like Anger, we all want to be dealt with fairness, especially when dealing with huge enterprise purchases. Imagine the frustration of undergoing fork-lift upgrades for end-of-life hardware, with no intention of utilizing the full rack capacity and not having a choice to use it for any other purpose. ScaleIO keeps Mr. Anger calm and composed with its extremely fair and flexible ‘pay-as-you-grow’ scalability and licensing models. In an industry where choice comes at a premium, ScaleIO enables the flexibility of configurations, empowering IT organizations to build the solution that best fits their application and business needs. To top it all, ScaleIO software not only simplifies the deployment of a fully-architected server SAN, it also eliminates the need for unpleasant, rage-inducing activities like capacity planning and data migrations!
Fear: Like an overanxious anti-virus who lives and breathes 
Murphy’s Law, Fear is on a constant vigil against potential disasters lurking around the corner. In the world of storage, one often finds Fear steering the control panel of our nervous system in case of mission critical workloads susceptible to unscheduled data outages due to outdated IT infrastructure. Enter ScaleIO – designed to survive the unplanned and unpredictable. It maintains uninterrupted I/O operations with its automatic data rebalance / rebuild capabilities across the cluster, and non-disruptive upgrade support. An ESG Lab validation report confirmed that a ScaleIO failure test in the “worst-case” scenario would easily put Mr. Fear permanently and uncharacteristically at ease.
Disgust: Disgust comes across as someone with really high standards and refuses to lower them. In other words, she can’t stand mediocrity. There are enterprises that are pioneers and market leaders in their own fields and like to maintain that position. They are hard to impress and have high expectations when choosing technology partners. You need to be the best in your product/service category in order to do business with them. When it comes to scale-out, server SAN block storage, ScaleIO is just that. With a tested scalability of over a thousand servers, an eye-popping ten million plus IOPS, and up to 60% better TCO than traditional SAN, ScaleIO is just the kind of technology with whom Disgust won’t mind letting her hair down for a change.
So, with EMC ScaleIO passing the Inside Out test in my books, it’s time for you to download your Free & Frictionless copy of the software and tell us how your control panel reacts!