Survival of the Most Innovative – Why EMC Stays on Top

By: Nick Kirsch, CTO, EMC Emerging Technologies and Stephen Manley, CTO, EMC Core Technologies

EMC has been recognized as a “Leader” in the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for General Purpose Disk Array Storage. We believe this means that we’re effectively executing against our vision today, and well prepared for tomorrow.

The state of today’s disk array market is highly competitive, but EMC maintains its leadership due to heavy investment in our vision and close iteration with our customers. With the pace of innovation accelerating across a wide variety of industries it is crucial for storage infrastructure to enable growth within these industries by supporting existing workloads as well as new and emerging workloads.

As IT evolves, storage infrastructure becomes even more critical —providing transparency, ease of management and agility on top of the enterprise requirements around performance, availability and scalability. Vendors and technology suppliers will continually need to innovate to meet IT needs, and develop techniques to support data as it grows and changes to accommodate new workloads.

As IT evolves, disk arrays have needed to progress with it—providing transparency, ease of management and souped-up software on top of the usual tenets of performance, availability and scalability. This means that vendors have had to continually innovate to meet IT needs, and find new ways to support data as it grows and changes to accommodate new workloads.

EMC Isilon, VNX, and VMAX have been able to stay on top in a rapidly evolving market. Our broad portfolio of recognized best-of-breed products in this market is a key advantage, as is our strategy of acquiring disruptive technologies. Think DSSD, TwinStrata and iWave, all of which have been or will be directly integrated into EMC’s portfolio to offer our customers leading-edge functionality.

And since EMC is never satisfied with the status quo, we’ve brought to market major updates to our storage portfolio such as building out Data Lake capabilities with EMC Isilon, introducing controller based data-at-rest encryption for the EMC VNX2 and EMC Isilon arrays designed for high end, edge-to-core video surveillance systems. And last but not least, EMC launched its most advanced high-end array to date, the VMAX3 to serve as the world’s first Enterprise Data Service Platform for hybrid cloud, hyper-consolidation and a bridge to supporting next-generation applications.

Products, however, aren’t our only advantage. What continues to make EMC a Magic Quadrant Leader in multiple markets is our business vision. On top of a robust and well-executed M&A strategy, EMC excels at building ecosystems and partnerships that increase EMC storage system attractiveness by improving ease of deployment and ongoing management.

The bottom line is that organizations will always need storage. How vendors deliver that storage will depend on the ever-shifting demands of IT today, and even in this well-established market, competition is fierce and only the innovators will survive.

Gartner Disk Arrays

View more about EMC’s placement in the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for General Purpose Disk Array Storage.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About the Author: Dell Technologies