... and turns off their cloud storage bits ...
By joe
- 2 minutes read - 270 wordsEMC is … um … gently nudging … with great force … customers off of atmos. One of the points we talk about with our customers is the concept of freedom from bricking in a physical sense. That is, our hardware and software stack will let you keep on using it and having it supported and supportable, even if we decide to turn the company into something unrelated to HPC and storage. The argument about clouds are that you should have similar freedom with your data … you should have control over when/where to move it and what to do with it. A change of business issue shouldn’t impact your choices. But, in this case, they did.
In every business analysis, you have to assess risk, risk remediation, and how you would handle complex situations, say like your cloud provider deciding to throw in the towel. It would be painful to have built a business case around a system that is going away, with no mechanism to easily service it, continue it … only replace it. That will increase costs, increase risk … is that worth the decreased cost per cycle? In some cases, yes. It depends upon your workflows. EMC is not a small company. Arguments that small company services are likely to go away aren’t all that strong, as we have seen Sun, now EMC pull back on what they offer, often to the detriment of specific customers. I am not saying EMCs decision was bad, or wrong. But its their decision, and not yours. If you have a dependency upon these decisions, you need a plan “B”.