Thoughts On the EMC-Isilon Deal

Storage giant EMC recently announced that itintends to acquire Isilon, a company that offers a number of storage products that can quickly and easily be scaled to meet massive storage needs. Isilon's approach focuses on using large numbers of inexpensive, commodity-class storage hardware clustered together to meet storage demands.

The acquisition fits well with EMC's other storage offerings, and underscores the fact that EMC is still willing to invest heavily in its core storage business. Granted, storage news like this may not be as sexy and headline-grabbing as the likes of virtualization, smartphones, and cloud computing -- a buzzworthy trifecta that seems to collect more media attention these days than the rest of the IT industry combined -- but it does prove that EMC intends to keep its crown as the IT storage solution leader.

Combined with EMC's recent acquisition of Greenplum, the Isilon deal also indicates that EMC is anticipating even more synergy between their core storage business and cloud computing. EMC VP and global marketing CTO Chuck Hollis pointed out as much in his blog, highlighting comments by EMC President & COO of Information Infrastructure Products Pat gelsinger that tied EMC's future to cloud computing.

"I believe that -- going forward -- it'll be increasingly difficult to separate the cloud discussion from big data," Gelsinger said. "Both derive efficiencies from scale. Both are being used to create new kinds of applications to extract value from information in ways we haven't seen before. Both are around IT that's built differently, operated differently and consumed differently."

Are you an EMC storage customer? I'd love to hear your comments and feedback on the Isilon acquisition -- feel free to add a comment to this blog post, or get the discussion started on Twitter.

Follow Jeff James on Twitter at @jeffjames3

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