Why build software for the storage industry for so many years? For me and many others, it comes down to one word. Challenge.
It’s not easy creating world-class products for the storage and information industry. There are literally millions of copies of EMC software and hundreds of thousands of EMC hardware products running in locations around the world.
Overcoming the challenges and shipping great products brings to mind another word: proud.
But this morning there’s a different word that’s more appropriate: giddy. Why?
Because Manny Ramirez is a CLARiiON user.
That’s Just Manny Being Manny
There’s been a lot of articles written about Red Sox left fielder Manny Ramirez, and it’s well known that off the field Manny works hard on his hitting. And I’m not talking about just the batting cages. I’m talking about watching hours and hours of videos of opposing pitchers. Sometimes just before game time. And for this activity Manny employs quite a number of different EMC products (including the aforementioned CLARiiON).
OK, Manny is using the CLARiiON, but he’s not bringing up Navisphere and creating RAID5 LUNs and changing cache settings. Like many users, he wants two things: he wants it to (a) work, and (b) work fast.
In other words, he wants those two foundational aspects of CLARiiON that I’ve been blogging about.
Performance and Data Integrity.
Safe at Home (and Away)
The Red Sox actually take the EMC Infrastructure on the road in addition to using the gear at Fenway Park. And one of the words they continually use while describing the infrastructure is “safe”. They trust it. They know that the data is going to be there. If some sort of disk failure happens right before game time, the videos still need to be available. The players are working hard to get that edge right up until the first pitch.
And it needs to be fast. Players don’t want to be staring at an hourglass when they pull up a video of an opposing pitcher.
CLARiiON was designed to be fast and safe. Kind of like Jacoby Ellsbury.
EMC Nation
So back to the original thought of my post. Building products like CLARiiON, as well as the rest of the infrastructure used by the Sox, is hard. Employees feel good that are products are prevalent in hospitals. It’s a great feeling to know that these products are also used in the financial industry to keep track of people’s life savings. So while the work is hard, the reward is great when one considers the adoption rate of EMC technology around the world. So myself and others like me have felt good for a while.
But to have them be used my Manny, Big Papi, and Jason Varitek? That’s why I’m using the word “giddy”.
I grew up in New England and started designing CLARiiON internals nearly twenty years ago. Never in my wildest dreams did I let myself believe that the manager of the Red Sox would be talking about how his players use our products. And this type of attention has got EMC nation pretty pumped up. Internal sales of Red Sox jerseys with EMC logos have been so great that the inventories were depleted (but new ones are on the way!). There are thousands of EMC employees that support CLARiiON, Centera, and Celerra in some way, and they all get an assist for helping the Sox.
And let’s not forget EMC employees in Japan, who must be going absolutely bananas. Think about it. MLB opening day is in Japan, Matsuzaka and Okajima are homecoming heroes, and EMC products are the technology story for MLB sponsorship. It just can’t get any better if you are an EMC employee in Japan right now.
Breakfast with The Sox
East Coast employees often take an early lunch on opening day, and for some reason you don’t see them for the rest of the afternoon. Opening day in Japan has changed our schedules around a little bit.
I’ll be in a little late today. ;>)
Steve
