For EMC CLARiiON and Celerra ... the end is nigh

For years, EMC has been selling 2 families of products - Celerra and CLARiiON but come Jan 19th (Jan 18th in the US), all things will change. It looks like for both Celerra and CLARiiON, it's the end of the road.

It all started with there were rumours in the market about EMC moving into a single, unified and multiprotocol platform. EMC's CEO, Joe Tucci confirmed in April last year that EMC was "collapsing" the platforms. Then came the Unisphere announcement, which practically sealed the fate of the 2 famous EMC families.

In about a week's time, EMC will unveiled the latest platform, the VNX (and VNXe), saying bye-bye to Celerra and CLARiiON. Details of the platforms are surfacing this week, ahead of the launch. There were some viral videos as well, with the tagline "Records will be broken". It's going to be interesting to see how the world react to the EMC product launch.

Below is a Powerpoint slide of the VNX and VNXe product portfolio.



I am impressed of how things have changed in EMC. CLARiiON from its acquisition of Data General in the 90s has done extremely well for EMC. It basically filled the mid-end to mid-high-end market tier for EMC, giving EMC a big market share in the SAN arena. The platform and technology have aged over the years, with the last platform, the CX4 doing extremely well to solidify EMC's position and ranking in the industry.

Meanwhile, the Celerra has seen several revisions, and although it was a so-so platform (in my opinion), it has never threatened NetApp's position in the market. Instead, NetApp went on strength to strength versus the EMC Celerra. For a while in the early 2000s, the Celerra became target practice for NetApp, including the famous IP4700, aka "NetApp killer".

But in the past 3-4 years, EMC, as a company, has grown into a superb company and the number 1 in the storage market. Yet, it has stayed very nimble with its products and solutions portfolio. To me, Joe Tucci is definitely the best CEO among the storage vendors because many of the EMC's acquisitions have gone on to do very well under the EMC's umbrella. The likes of Data Domain, VMware, Avamar, and Documentum continue to dominate and grow big revenues for EMC.

So, it will be exciting times ahead for EMC and for the rest of us in the storage industry.