Why Maginatics, why now?

Answer for this one is simpler than the Cloudscaling one.   We’ve been watching the space of “storage things that use object storage” closely for a while. 

What’s clear is that it’s very hard to make “cloud tier” a product (it seems to be a very important “feature”) and it seems hard to make “cloud gateway” a company (it seems to be a very important “product category”).   This was clear from looking at the whole startup ecosystem.

When we acquired TwinStrata, that was just the first move – we viewed their technology as a great way to accelerate VNX/VMAX “Tier to Cloud” (doesn’t make as much sense with XtremIO which is all about AFA performance and latency).   Cloud Pools on Isilon is well on it’s way organically.   So - “Tier to Cloud” as a feature: check.

But… Architecting for broad namespace duties where ALL storage is object?   That’s a different design target.   So – we’ve been evaluating the space very closely for a couple years.

Clearly – we’re not the only one that thinks this :-)   Yesterday, NetApp acquired Steel Store from Riverbed (congrats to the Steel Store team!).

Our assessment over the last few years led us to Maginatics as the strongest in this market, particularly coupled with the EMC machine – hence “Why Maginatics”.  

So - “Why now?”   Well, for a couple reasons:

• Only recently are the public cloud object stores getting in the economic bands that make this model more compelling…though notably, we can still deliver an EMC private object store at a lower economic price in the form of the EMC Elastic Cloud Storage appliance!
• We can offer the customer a choice of a EMC-powered public cloud target (vCloud Object Store).   Of course, Maginatics works with AWS S3 and all the other obvious choices.

You can expect (over time), broad integration with the EMC portfolio from Storage Resource Management, the ViPR Controller and much more.

Check them out here!

A warm EMC welcome to the Maginatics team!