Sales Education Justifying Symmetrix 3000: Using The “Why EMC” Comparison Chart An Audiotape with Jeff Allen and Chuck Hollis W hat follows is an explanation of how to use the chart, W hy EMC Open StorageSymmetrix 3000 vs. Conventional Disk: W e’ve found that when we give briefings or present to customers, they love the message: the vision is great, the strategy is right on, they like the value messages. But when they walk away from a briefing, the next thing they say is, "Now, why do I have to pay $1.50 more a megabyte for EMC storage than someone else’s storage?". The goal of the Why EMC comparison chart for Symmetrix 3000 is to help you establish a dollar value with your customer that gives them the reason and the justification to spend the additional money for EMC Open Storage. You can use the chart in a couple of ways: During a presentation, use it as an overhead to talk about soft values for all categories and to “raise the issue of value” and get them thinking about it. During a working session, sit down with your customer and put in hard dollar values for each of these items. There are a lot of items on the sheet, so it’s unlikely that your customer will buyoff on all of them. The goal here is not to establish buy-off on every category, but to establish enough value that the customer leaves convinced that spending the additional money on Symmetrix 3000 is worth it. Let’s go through each item on the chart to give you a point/counter point on each issue and how you can present them to your customer. Architecture The first point is architecture. Symmetrix is an intelligent storage computer. It has algorithms, it has advanced technologies, and it can do things that ‘plain old storage’ just can’t do. This can be positioned in a couple of ways: additional features, additional performance, or more importantly, a technology path that helps them move forward. It’s hard to assign a hard dollar value to this, but EMC Company Confidential -1- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 create a picture for your customers that says, “This is not just a bunch of disk with wires coming out of it. This is something very different.” OUR MOSAIC:2000 architecture forms the foundation of all the concepts and capabilities on the W hy EMC chart we’re discussing. MOSAIC:2000 is more than a marketing term. It is a legitimate architecture that enables us to change the front- end and the back-end, and not worry about whether it’s 3GB drives, 9GB drives, next generation technology, block mux or wide-SCSI today. W hatever the next technology is, MOSAIC:2000 will support it. So, we have a multi-platform architecture. Increasing Useful Life Most people approach buying disks as tactical. They want to make a short term problem go away. Buying a Symmetrix, however, is a strategic investment for needs now and into the future. Because Symmetrix 3000 is designed to provide mainframe-class capabilities, it offers a useful life of four to five years, like you would see in the mainframe world. On the other hand, in the open systems world, we are finding people are depreciating technology to zero within 12, 18 or 24 months. One of the driving factors behind this is the rapid pace of new technology. W hen a new disk drive or new technology comes out, customers are typically forced to walk away from their investments. Vendors drop support on disk drives very quickly as soon as new items come out. Have you seen any of th a t? Look at PCs. The example of 386 to 486 to Pentium to P6. Or look at multiple generations of HP architecture. If the system is no longer supported after 2 years, you need to get your customer to acknowledge that. “Look, Mr. Customer, with Symmetrix, you can support it four to five to six years, and with your storage its 1 or 2 or 3 years.” All you need to do is get them to support that. Then you establish a price that they are spending for storage. Let’s say they are spending a half a million dollars for storage. If you can amortize half a million dollars of storage for over five years, that’s $100,000 a year versus $250,000 for just two years. So that’s a huge savings you can justify right there in tangible goods. All you have to do is ask your customer and get an agreement with him and get a number down in the column on the right hand side. Increased Performance The next point on the chart, Increased Performance, plays a lot of different ways. Root fact is that a Symmetrix, in most applications, will dramatically increase performance. And that has a different spin on values. You can do more work in a shorter amount of time; you can save money on upgrades. So we’re going to examine each of these as we go through it. So, how much of a performance increase will you see? It varies. W orst case, we’ve seen 50% improvements. These climb all the up to two times, three times four times... up to eight times the performance measured at the application level. You have to EMC Company Confidential -2- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 ask your customer, “W hat is that going to buy you?” And we’ll look at it a couple of different ways. You can take core business processes like month-end closes and batch runs and compress them into much smaller amounts of time, but the tough part I’ve found is getting people to quantify the value of that time: “W hat’s it worth to you?” Think of some of the examples used in the Business Impact Profiles; the key here is to establish the value. One of our retailing customers was able to stay in business two days longer at the end of their quarter and process more of their work. That has tangible, bottom line dollar relief for that customer. They felt that was worth over $20 million to the bottom line at the end of the year. Now, all you have to do is get your customer to say, “No, it’s not worth $20 million; it’s only worth $2 million,” and you’ve got them nailed. So the issue here is to establish a value. You have to dig and find out what their application is and what you can do to add value by increasing performance. Use Smaller Systems If they can’t look at the value of the business process, maybe they can get by with a smaller system or, conversely put, “You may be looking at a CPU upgrade, Mr. Customer. Since I’m dramatically improving your performance, you can either think in terms of a smaller Sequent, a smaller Sun, something other than a T-500 from HP and probably get better performance from that small box simply because you now have better I/O.” So you have to ask the question, ”Are you looking at upgrading your CPUs any time soon?” That money needs to go to us because now you don’t have to do it. “Are you looking at anything in the area of downsizing existing servers? Could you potentially consolidate onto one server instead of having multiples?” Keep in mind that savings cascade. If I get into smaller boxes or fewer boxes, not only do I save on hardware, maintenance comes down. Software licenses come down. Management overhead comes down. So you can take that one smaller box concept and spin off three or four different savings streams for the customer. A customer doesn’t necessarily know the size of the system they need. W hat’s the traditional answer from a system vendor when they say “I need more performance”? They say, “You need more memory and you need more CPU.” If you take a look at an HP T-500, a system at $90,000 per CPU, that’s a lot of money. Take a look at one of the benchmarks we just ran. W e took a T-500 with four CPUs and ran the same application using Symmetrix on a single-processor I-70 HP. W e went from 345 rows per second to 7500 rows per second. W hat we found out is that you don’t necessarily need the size of the system you thought you needed. Now, if you think about being able to defer an upgrade for processors, think of it from a financial perspective. Three CPUs at $90,000 apiece is $270,000. If you can defer those three CPUs for a period of one or two years, you have the use of that money and, at the end of two years, those CPUs don’t cost $90,000 apiece. They cost 30% less per year. So at the end of two EMC Company Confidential -3- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 years, instead of spending $270,000, you may be spending $185,000, plus having the use of the money, plus deferring an upgrade, and being able to spend within your budget to get the storage. So the ability to defer an upgrade or use a smaller system has tangible value to you immediately and you can justify that number to a customer right on this sheet. Save System Slots It’s not just the hardware. Don’t forget everything else that comes with it: it’s the software, it’s the maintenance, it’s the labor. But there’s another way to look at this, too. Very often as people get into larger and larger systems they find themselves getting squeezed on slots. W hy is that? They can plug in four to six drives on a single SCSI controller. If you want more storage, you need more controllers. You need more slots. W ell, if you look at Sequent’s product line, what they sell you is slots. The little one, the medium one and the big one all have different numbers of slots. Same with HP, IBM and everybody else. So if the customer has a decision support application, you’ve got a handful of people that want to access a large amount of storage. Do you really need a maximal system or do you want to be able to plug lots and lots of storage onto a much smaller system? So look at the value of a system slot. W e ran into a lot of customers that are either, a) looking at an upgrade just to plug in storage or, b) just can’t plug it all in and are facing very expensive alternatives. You always have to ask the question, “Are you mirroring?” because, remember, when you mirror on a normal UNIX you’re using twice as many slots. That’s a real problem. So, we’ve been able to go to a number of customers and say “W ell, with this architecture, how big a system do you need now?” W e have an example. W e had a customer in a few weeks ago with a large SP2 with 104 nodes. The customer said, “I have two problems. One of them is I have all these channels I have to connect and all the cabling which is a nightmare to connect up all the nodes. The other problem is that IBM said if I want more performance what I have to add another 256MB of memory to all 104 nodes.” I asked the question, “W ell, what’s the price tag on that?” and they said $3 million. They still had to buy the storage as well. So I asked the obvious question: “If you could do that for $3 million of storage and not have to put the additional memory in and perhaps even reduce the number of CPUs that were in that system and reduce the number of slots you need, what’s that worth? On an IBM SP2 you can put 15 nodes in a rack before you have to go to the next rack. W ell, what’s it worth if I save a rack, save all those nodes. There’s tremendous value there. EMC Company Confidential -4- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 Save on System Memory And that brings us to our next point. In addition to saving system slots, you can also save on system memory. Again, conventional UNIX wisdom is, “If it’s running slow, throw more memory at it.” W ell, there are a couple of problems with that. First of all, UNIX is volatile. UNIX cache can’t be used for writes, at least not safely; and UNIX cache tends to be very, very limited and not used too intelligently. Also, if you max out one of these UNIX boxes with two gigs of RAM, that memory is not available to all the other systems on your floor. So we’ve been able to make the point that, because we have such a large, shareable, non-volatile cache in the Symmetrix, you can get by with considerably less memory on all of your UNIX boxes. In a high performance environment, you may take half of your system memory or more and turn it over to buffers and cache. In the Symmetrix environment, you may be able to get away with only 15% to 20% of your memory used for UNIX buffers and cache. On a large system, you’re saving 256MB of memory, maybe as much as 512MB of memory. And again, over multiple systems, this can really add up. Enable Re-Usable Storage But let’s just draw the line on making smaller boxes and making them run faster. Let’s step back and take a look at this whole concept of re-useable storage. This is where we really tend to shine because, although a lot of people may be able to make performance claims, we’ve found that we’re just about the only ones in the business who can enable this concept of vendor-independent, shareable storage. So let’s take the first point: the ability to re-use storage. In other words, if I have a platform on my floor today, what can I do with the storage tomorrow? So I typically ask the question, “W hat was the fastest UNIX processor last year at this time?” I think you’ll get some answers. “W ell, what’s the fastest UNIX processor today? How about twelve months from now?” All you have to do is get them to agree that it might be a different platform and you get the point across. Nobody wants to walk away from a storage investment. But there are some real examples behind this, too. Take a look at UNIX in general. Aside from the fact that servers come and go every 18 to 24 months or every 36 months, there are other things too. In the UNIX business, most customers start pilot applications. And they’ll start with development, for example, on a small Sun because they don’t want to spend a tremendous amount of money on that but they still have to pay for that system. They may go to production on an SP2 or a T-500 or on a Sequent or any other machine. By having re-usable storage they can save their investment in that storage and continue into production and continue further development. W ithout being able to reuse storage their investment is lost and, therefore, they lose all the value in time and money and effort that’s been put into utilizing that storage in the first place. So we’re seeing a real value in being able to reuse storage. I find this point to be exceptionally interesting. EMC Company Confidential -5- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 Think about the slide that we typically talk about as the before and after paradigm: The “Before” piece says each server has its own storage. The EMC model shows multiple servers connected to the same storage system. I talked to Oracle sometime ago and I asked Oracle the question, “How much storage do you need to reorganize your files twice, three times a year or even monthly?” Oracle said, “Thirty percent of the storage is devoted to reorganization.” So if you imagine now having four separate servers each 100GB and each with 30GB devoted to reorganization. That’s 120GB spread among those four servers. The moment I put those four servers on a consolidated storage solution, I no longer need all 120GB, I only need 30GB and I can reorganize each server, one at a time, one after the other and have a hard, tangible savings of 90GB of storage in that example. And that’s because the storage is re-useable and I can reconfigure and reallocate the storage as I choose. Allow Storage Sharing That’s kind of a double benefit between the reusable concept, in other words, every platform on your floor, and this concept of storage sharing. Now, I want to caution you today that, the manageability aspect of Symmetrix makes this reallocation of storage a little difficult unless you put some forethought into it. The current issue we face today is that if someone wants to change their whole Symmetrix configuration, we basically have to have the customer engineer come out and do it. That will be changing soon, so I’m going to stick to the message. There are peak demands and dips in all of this: database reorg, end of the month closing, a project that doesn’t work out and you want to allocate the EMC Company Confidential -6- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 storage somewhere else. The more platforms you have on your floor, the more value you’ll see out of shared storage. One box, there’s no value; two, there’s some. If you see four or more boxes you can start naming 50, 60, 100GB numbers that they can save just because they can share it. It’s a very compelling concept. W e had a customer that had four HP servers. Each one of these HP servers had the same data base on it. The customer would download the same data to all four of the servers; it took 72 hours to get all the data down. W ith the strategy we put in place, instead of having the servers duplicate their data four times, we put all four servers onto the same system, downloaded the data once in only seven hours. In this decision support environment, all four servers could read the same data and that’s exactly what they wanted to do. So they had the ability to share storage. They had the ability to consolidate it and they had significant performance improvement by going from 72 hours to 7 hours of downloading. And that was done every week. You reduce the amount of time it takes significantly to download the data and you increase the reliability in terms of having to maintain four separate systems and maintain the data and handle all four of those at the same time. You can look at actually shrinking the total storage needed because you can share it. You can look at the risk factor saying that, if something doesn’t work out, I don’t walk away from the storage or you can look at it in some cases as time and labor savings because you’ve compressed the business process that had to use a network or tape that now can use shared disk in new and creative ways. Increasing Useable Storage The next selection mentions Increasing Useable Storage. In the mainframe world, you can’t fill your disks all the way. The idea is that if you fill your disks you’re maximizing head motion and performance suffers. The same thing holds true in UNIX. If you have a high performance application typically what you’ll do is use the sweet spot in the middle of the disk and avoid the outsides, using only 50, 60, up to 70% of the disk. So what we find in an ICDA environment with Symmetrix is that, yes, you can fill your disk. W ell, what’s this 35% of increased storage worth to you? W ell, its worth a couple of things. First of all, if somebody wants 300GB of storage, you can offer them 200 and change and say, “W ell, look, you can fill mine up all the way.” The second is, you can translate it into performance. No longer do you have to add more slots, more channels, more disks, more maintenance just to get an equivalent level of performance. W e’ve talked about this with a few people and, lo and behold, they’re mainframers, they shake their heads up and down and say it’s true. I had a similar experience also with someone who was in the UNIX side of the house and had come from the mainframe side. They challenged me a little bit EMC Company Confidential -7- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 and they said, no, they don’t fill it up to 95%; they fill it up to 85%. And so I said, “All right, well, if we can fill it up to 95%, what’s 10% worth? And if you’re buying 1/2 million dollars worth of storage is that worth something?” So once again, you start with a number and you set a stake in the ground and you say, “W e can do it at 95%; you can do it at 60%” and let the customer come back. Remember, the whole goal is to put a stake in the ground and let the customer come back to you with a different number. You don’t want to start from the bottom up; you want to start from the top and say, “This is the number we think it costs and this is the savings to you and let the customer come back and say, “No, it’s not a hundred thousand dollars savings; its a $45,000 savings” and now you have a tangible number to work with. Decreasing Management Resource That’s a good piece of advice. Let’s talk about Decreasing Management Resource. You can actually look at it two ways: Everybody knows people are expensive. W e use a round number of $100,000 fully loaded cost per person per year. If they already have a Symmetrix on the floor, they don’t need to increase their management staff. The same management staff that they have in place today can be used to manage their open systems storage along side their mainframe storage. There’s no need to add headcount. If you’re going to be managing a terabyte of new storage on the floor, someone’s going to have to configure it, manage it, protect it, administer it. So that’s one way I’ve discussed that management resource argument. The second way I’ve talked about it is for someone who doesn’t already have a Symmetrix on the floor and the way I tell that side is, “Hey, you don’t need someone on site all the time to handle a disk crash. W e handle that remotely with continuous availability. You don’t need someone on staff who can diagnose problems. W e do that remotely. This is such a hassle-free continuous availability environment you can take your head count and use it for more productive things but you certainly won’t be looking at adding additional headcount just to manage storage. On this issue, customers have different perspectives, such as “There’s no effect on us at all” and “W e don’t mind changing the headcount. It has no impact on us.” And I think the issue there is the whole goal of this chart is to look for the ones that the customer buys off on and to look for the ones that they don’t buy off on. So we’re finding there are some customers who absolutely feel this is a very important aspect for them and others that don’t think it’s that important. The whole goal is for you to set the stake in the ground. Support Continuous Availability Decreased management resource goes hand in hand with Supporting Continuous Availability. W e have found that, with Symmetrix, there’s a whole different paradigm here. In the earlier model, if the server were to go down, the storage goes down, the application is out. In the model with EMC, EMC keeps the storage running. Most people who think about continuous availability think EMC Company Confidential -8- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 about RAID-1 or RAID-5. But they don’t think about the impact of what it takes to recover and get the system back up. Anybody who’s been in the UNIX business long enough knows that UNIX is not the most reliable system in the world. But if we can keep our storage up and running, time to recover and the ability to keep the applications running significantly longer is to our advantage and is worth a significant amount of money. W hat is it worth to your customer if they don’t have an outage because we keep the storage up and running? Some people are very concerned about having problems. Other people, for whatever reason, haven’t seen any issues. But just today in the EBC when I was giving a customer briefing, this guy said, “You know, it was just a holiday weekend for everybody else but me. I was in the shop, I was restoring tapes, I was fixing broken disks. I hate my storage.” Timing may have something to do with this. Sometimes you’re successful at creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about the storage outage that hasn’t happened but if they’ve been in this for a while, they’ve experienced this pain and will do anything to avoid it. And there’s a hard cost in terms of business process interruption. There’s also a soft cost which I’ll call hassle factor: the unscheduled, unplanned emergency which no one likes. There’s another twist to this, too. It goes hand in hand with the sharing storage. Say a customer has a homogenous environment and multiple servers all connected to the same storage system. In the event a server actually goes down, they can move that application over to another server because all the data, all the resources, are sitting on that same storage system as opposed to having storage separated server by server. They can actually get back up and running much faster than they could if they had individual servers with storage. Remote Mirroring Remote Mirroring can be a difficult and complex topic. The idea in the mainframe world is of business continuance. If your mainframe goes down we have an easy way for you to get back up again at a remote site. The problem in the UNIX world is that very, very few UNIX sites that we’ve met have any provision for disaster recovery and those that do typically don’t manage this themselves. They’re going with a Comdisco or other third party disaster recovery outfit. So what we usually have to do is draw a picture of OK, it’s two years out, this is mission critical and now you do have a business continuance issue. If they’re already a Symmetrix customer they’re probably already looking at SRDF to handle their mainframe requirements. Being able to say, “I can do it for open systems, too,” has a value associated with it. The other thing I wanted to spin around was that, if you had to do real time, synchronized business continuance things with, for example, Sybase Replicator or Oracle Replication, those things just don’t work. Nobody can make them work right and there’s always these big windows of exposure. So our problem, is that we have to draw a picture out in the future when the customer is going to have to do this because they’re not doing it today. EMC Company Confidential -9- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 There are two situations for which this is not a problem. One, if we’re talking to our mainframe customers who are making decisions for open systems, they buy off immediately on the value and the importance of this. Understand that so many departmental servers are coming back to the control of IS and they’re concerned about this. It has an impact; if not a financial one, an emotional one to the customer. And the other one is that if you find a customer that in fact is already doing continuation services with a Sunguard, or a Comdisco, then you have a home run sitting right there on the spot; they would love to figure out how they support larger databases remotely. Today, backing them up is a real problem and the ability to do remote mirroring is one way they look at providing a backup. Even though we call it a business continuation service, they look at it as a way of keeping their systems on-line in a remote location. Increase CPU Vendor Leverage In the past few weeks this next concept has raised a few eyebrows. It turns out, in the dynamics of dealing with vendors, like the HPs and the Suns and the IBMs, when you take storage out of the equation they have to compete on the value of the system and the operating system they’re selling. Again, you’re forcing them to unbundle their offerings. And, we’re finding that if a customer is smart about that they can drive a better deal with their system vendor. Driving a better deal is an understatement. In some of these, we’ve seen reduction in pricing from the system vendor as much as 40% but interestingly there’s one other twist to this. And the twist is, we’re actually now seeing customers buying storage first in advance of the system servers. They do this for many reasons. The customer doesn’t know the performance they may need so they want to bring in a server and try it and, if in fact, the storage is in place they can get a benchmark and establish a metric against that storage system. Then bring another server in and bring another server in and basically they can determine what is the right server and what’s the right size of system. It may not be a T-500 with four processors, it might be an I-70. W e’ve seen some real leverage from our customers to be able to do that. EMC Company Confidential -10- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 24 x 7 Warranty W arranty is a very important point. Every Symmetrix goes out the door with a standard two year, 24 by 7 warranty. Do you know what the value of that is? Many system vendors don’t even offer 24 by 7 and if they do they can’t offer the same guaranteed response times we do. Not only that, the story is, you call the guy, he comes out, he takes a look at it and then he has to go off and get parts. W e’ve got remote support; we don’t have a problem. W e dial in, figure out what the problem is and we show up with the right parts. So even if you could get this service from your other system vendors it wouldn’t be of the same high quality and responsiveness of what you get bundled in with your EMC Symmetrix as part of your purchase price. You’ll find, if you look at standard offerings, they don’t come 24 by 7, they come with an option to go to 24 by 7 and there’s a significant value savings in that. You just need to look, on a case by case basis, which vendor you’re dealing with and you can establish a pretty significant value. All you have to do is say to your customer “How much are you spending a year on maintenance?” The first two years of maintenance are already taken care of with EMC. This is also useful as a positioning tool. W e’re serious about this storage. W e’re serious about your application. W hy would anybody want anything but 24 by 7 from a mainframe class organization? Save Floor Space Everyone’s impressed by the fact that we use much less floor space because, again, these HPs and Sun Arrays just seem to expand all over the floor but unless somebody’s up against the wall, literally and figuratively speaking, it’s hard to get the importance of that point across. Let me give you two examples. I talked to a customer and because of the good job Symmetrix did, they had so much room in their data center it just didn’t matter. But I’ve run into many more customers where they have a room is a problem. They have room that’s dedicated to open systems and I’ve said “W here are you putting this additional storage and servers that are coming in?” and the answer is that they’re having to build another building. So I ask them “If we could delay or defer your expansion into a new building, not just the floorspace you save at $15 a square foot, what’s that worth?” You have to ask the question. And you may not have all the answers but the value is in asking the question and getting the customer to agree to the value. And if the problem isn’t there today there’s a good chance it’ll be there in the future: growth, capacity problems, performance challenges. So, we’ve made it through our chart. W e hope we’ve spawned some interesting thinking about how you can establish value with your customers. EMC Company Confidential -11- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0 Keep in mind the goal is to get numbers in the column on the right side of the chart. Put a stake in the ground, establish a value that is high and let the customer come back with what that number should be so when the customer leaves and asks “W hy EMC Open Storage?” the question is answered and he now has a tool to sell this internally with his management. EMC Company Confidential -12- 2 3 .0 9 .2 0 2 0
