Why “Good Enough” Is NOT Good Enough

Earlier this month, while attending a conference, I had some great conversations with EMC channel partners about EMC XtremIO and its application transformation capabilities. Throughout these discussions, multiple partners shared that they’ve seen competitive losses occur when a customer feels that “good enough” is good enough. I wish I could say that this conference marked the first time I heard this sentiment. Yet, during my years at EMC, I’ve spoken to many customers who solely equate value with “price per .. insert the customers metric..” rather than true overall value, the “good enough” scenario.

The struggle to view value beyond purchase price is common and customers often come to meetings with preconceived ideas around their needs or wants, many meetings are initiated to address resource needs around a specific project or initiative. And, while many customers cannot recognize the value of a product beyond the project at hand, this myopic vision can hurt the customer’s business in the long run.

It’s time for customers to look beyond the next project … And, instead, show your customers the long-term value that a product like EMC XtremIO can bring to their businesses.

Here is your bag of tools for the “good enough” is NOT good enough discussion:

Mixed workload consolidation is a key to beyond “good enough” flash storage

With EMC XtremIO a business can consolidate production, non-production workloads and mixed characteristic workloads onto a single platform that meet SLA requirements. This one platform can be utilized for everything from application testing to backup/recovery to upgrades with our unique integrated copy data management (iCDM).

Saves Customers time and money on capacity and capacity planning: iCDM allows for zero-dollar copies, instantaneously and without disrupting production.
Reduces Time-to-Market: iCDM allows businesses to move more quickly—whether through an internal application upgrade, new application implementation to improve processes, or even product development and testing. EMC XtremIO’s iCDM capabilities have helped customers improve their application development process by 40%! It’s important to note that the 40% process improvement is driven by the benefits of our 100% in-memory, data services and not the flash media.
Enables Self-Service: Coupled with the AppSync® iCDM Starter Bundle, we offer rich application workflow orchestration and automation which sets XtremIO (even further) apart from all other All-Flash-Array vendors in the market today.

One application owner at a large Telco told me he must submit a written request to the storage owner in order to have test copies created —which can take about a week to allocate and has costs associated with it ... Tell me: How is this good enough?

Rich features and functionality come standard with EMC XtremIO

“Good enough” flash storage doesn’t come with fully-integrated services, creating additional purchase costs and management requirements. And, don’t forget about extra application integration and testing. Not so with XtremIO—it comes fully integrated with rich features and functionality built in, meaning that there are no extras to buy and the management is simple and can be automated. But more importantly, EMC XtremIO features are inline, all the time! Many “good enough” arrays will offer some of these data services as “check-box” features, but when their array gets busy, they turn them off. Disabling data services when you need them most does not sound “good enough”. In addition, EMC has a full ecosystem surrounding EMC XtremIO and deep level of integration already complete with many of the applications your customer is using today. Yes, we’ve done it for you.

It’s always been done this way – won’t work anymore

Your customer may provide capacity requirements, based on what they’ve experienced to be true. This is your opportunity to demonstrate how EMC XtremIO can greatly reduce a customer’s capacity requirements with its inline, all-the-time deduplication and compression … again, which are built-in, not extra. Show how the elimination of redundant data and reduction in storage requirements will provide room to grow today, tomorrow, and into the future.

“good enough” can lead to higher OPEX costs

The basics—power, cooling, floor space—equate to increased spending. How about having this discussion with your customer… “Let me tell you how EMC XtremIO has efficiencies that reduce your OPEX and keep it low, and here is how” ESG lab performed hands-on testing of EMC XtremIO. The testing was designed to show how XtremIO can be used to help consolidate workloads and infrastructure as well as provide benefits that can help optimize the daily operation of the business. Among other findings which you can read about in the full article here, these are some highlights:

6.0X Lower on Power and Cooling Costs – Consolidating with XtremIO requires far less hardware thanks to intelligent design and ultra-space efficiencies. XtremIO requires fewer controllers, enclosures, and disks while providing far lower latency operations.
2.2X Lower Support and Maintenance – Fewer systems to keep hardware and software support and maintenance contracts on.
5.8X Lower Administrative Costs –This included: 98% less time planning for growth and resource optimization, 68% less daily task system management time, 67% less time planning application deployment and optimization, 71% less time managing backups, 88% less time managing copies of data (iCDM)

Customers are also documenting their OPEX savings. MOEN reduced their footprint by 70%. Callaway Golf reported a 75% reduction in floor space and roughly 35% savings per year for same amount of raw storage capacity. Read more about these and other customer profiles here.

The Xpect More 2.0 program is another antidote to the “good enough is good enough” way of thinking. This program delivers unprecedented value in the world of storage, and offers: