The storage company has changed its focus from being a purely storage company to storage and information management and now to finally concentrate on information infrastructure with its strategy to align IT infrastructure with the business based on the changing value of information. Jon Murray, EMC program manager for South Asia, said that the information challenges that companies usually face today include the fact that 80 percent of the IT budget is consumed by maintenance as IT struggles to align with the business.
Information is also under constant attack, he said, 75 percent of U.S. companies suffer data loss each year; of these, 43 percent never reopen for business. High value information is also underutilized and unprotected and low value information ends up clogging the infrastructure as users save everything but manage nothing. What the market needs today is intelligent storage, he said, because while the Philippines five years ago is a consumer of capacity, today it is about intelligence. "Today the market says, "Capacity I can buy anywhere, but what can you do for me to give me an edge?" said Murray.
Businesses who used to buy technical specs are also changing as they now survey the breadth of offerings based on the needs of their customers. It is the content that sells, said the EMC program manager, citing gaming as an example of a business that lives on content. Information protection is therefore the biggest dynamic of change, said Murray, as it ensures that information is always an asset and never a liability.
As customers have been looking for better ways to optimize their information and application recovery investments, information protection is consequently evolving beyond tape backup. Ron Demone, area consulting manager for EMC in Asia, said that several challenges to data recoverability today, include: restoring from tape can take weeks, users today need continuous access to the data, and secondary copy of data is always needed to meet data recoverability requirements.
"For now, tape and disk seem to be very comfortable at coexistence, but eventually all protection will be disk-based," said Murray. The EMC program manager added that the market's mindset in the Philippines has changed as spending for stuff has become not just IT decision. "Days of IT deciding what can be done are falling away," he said because, while before IT people have been making decisions, now users are beginning to see what can be done and what options are available.
One of EMC's propositions is continuous data protection (CDP) through its new software offering EMC RecoverPoint. CDP, said Demone, is a new concept under the information lifecycle management (ILM) umbrella that offers to provide immediate access to data at infinitely granular points-in-time as data is captured whenever any change is made and recovery points are available for every instant in time. CDP is also said to allow users to quickly recover the most recent, clean copy of the affected files, file system, database, or application in the event of data corruption.
CDP is then supposed to protect customers from data loss caused by logical corruption and server hardware failures. RecoverPoint also supports heterogenous storage arrays, applications, and operating systems, therefore protecting existing storage investments, said Murray. "But CDP is not a be-all and end-all; it's just another option for customers," he said.
EMC also announced recent enhancements to its flagship backup and recovery software- EMC Legato Networker- and new software for backup reporting and analysis- EMC Backup Advisor. The company has a new focus on software, said country manager Latinazo, adding that the software segment has played a significant part in their success in 2005. "If we have stayed with hardware, we would have been much smaller," he said. The EMC Philippines country manager said that the company is experiencing high growth on the software side and projects growth for the software segment this year.