I was getting ready to write EMC off, at least in the mid-tier. The Clariion was old-tech, and an old way of doing things. They screamed unified, but it didn’t feel that way. Celerra in the NS/NX felt like a bolt-on. They were expensive, fragmented and difficult to work with.
EMC had been making a number of good buys over the past couple of years. RSA, VMware, Kashya and Data Domain come to mind. Avamar and YottaYotta were lesser-known pieces. When it came to primary storage, however it seemed stale. Then they started showing the cards they were holding.
First came VMAX. They refreshed the Symmetrix line with a modular, scalable architecture. It could grow from something small to something big. But the real changes starting coming with FAST and FAST VP.
