Rarely do you see the kind of excitement around a technology announcement like the DSSD acquisition announced in Joe Tucci’s keynote at EMC World, which begs the question Why is that? Especially since most published info about DSSD is a set of patents with an unknown timeframe for first product release.
When you dig into what’s available to the public you start realizing that these guys designed an architecture with the future in mind. DSSD is purpose built solution for in-memory application type-of-architectures with extreme high I/O performance capabilities, extreme low latency, and very high scalability. It would make no sense for me to try to explain how this is possible…hence you can either read this (long) blog post by one of our techies at EMC, the Canadian dude! Or you can try to decipher info from reading the patents filed about their underlying technology.
I have been around high tech enough to also realize that when a bunch of super geeks get excited about something you may want to pay attention. It was also very cool that Bill McDermott (SAP’s CEO) showed up in Tucci’s keynote on a live video stream talking about the EMC & SAP Partnership as well as how excited he is about DSSD.
Now, for most companies saying they may have a ground breaking solution coming, some people would say, that’s great but it’s not here today. The cool thing at EMC and the federation of companies with VMware, RSA and Pivotal is that we have world leading technologies for our SAP clients around Cloud & Big Data…take for example the Virtual SAP HANA production support announcement on Tuesday May 6, 2014 during EMC World.
During EMC World I was fortunate to have an opportunity to get to sit down with EMC CTO John Roese walking through his perspective on DSSD. John described the acquisition as a calculated bet by EMC on where the future of technology innovation will evolve. Today, the new architecture that DSSD provides only lends itself to a few use cases like SAP HANA, MongoDB, Hadoop. By any means not enough business justification to acquire DSSD, however, making the acquisition and being able to add some fuel (EMC is lucky to have a few extra billions available for various R&D projects…), EMC believes that this new architecture paradigm will grow in popularity to the point where applications and technology vendors start to build solutions optimized for this new DSSD architecture. By investing in the future with DSSD EMC is co-innovating for the future ensuring that EMC has an opportunity to be part of the next wave of innovation.
I believe we are willing to cannibalize our own current technologies in order to have a better, faster and cheaper way to solve problems we solve today, and also to foresee those coming in the future.
Why am I excited about DSSD? It changes the paradigm for SAP HANA…
So far, other than TDI and Virtual HANA, clients have relied on vendors’ technology solutions in the HANA PAM (Product Availability Matrix) and all vendors including us talk about why their configurations is superior, but let’s be real for a second to realize we are just talking about existing server technology with existing storage technology (HANA persistent layer) to package it up in an Appliance using available protocols. I guess IBM could try to say that their stuff is unique (GPFS) however, when the majority of their own reference clients tell me that they would rather do without GPFS, the reality is that most HANA appliance solutions are similar. This is why I wrote a previous blog about EMC’s ability to provide solutions for how to best “Deploy” and “Operationalize” SAP HANA matters.
Last year at Sapphire two SAP industry leaders advised us to do something new and different around SAP HANA…unfortunately I can’t claim I personally am the reason that DSSD showed up, but I do like the reference to the fact that our company “EMC” listens to them and to the industry in what it takes to stay relevant.
Lastly, if you have been around this blog, SAP Week events, chatted with me and others in our SAP Posse, you may have heard of EMCs Big Data Platform for SAP (aka Project Jupiter), so what happens to Jupiter when DSSD becomes a reality? Think Jupiter 2.0 based on DSSD! That’s like Seabiscuit with an Aston Martin Turbocharged engine showing up to the Derby looking at the other horses saying “why do you even bother?” 🙂
Henrik Wagner 