3Par and Network Appliance (NetApp) have thrown down the gauntlet to EMC after a joint agreement to bundle their products and target the data consolidation market place.
The two vendors have agreed to align their engineering and support functions, including software enhancements, for the NetApp V Series, and 3Par’s InServe ranges.
Craig Nunes, vice-president of marketing at 3Par, said: “This agreement will mean both sets of our resellers can offer a block and file consolidation solution and create some elbow room in traditional EMC accounts. The loser here is EMC and its partners that are offering their DMX or Celerra and attempting to do SAN or NAS consolidation. We are aiming to push aside EMC and take footprint from it. We want to wear down EMC resellers.”
Nunes added that there is overlap between the two vendors’ channels, therefore it would not require much additional training for VARs to begin selling the solution.
Pete Rawden, channel sales director at NetApp, said the total cost of ownership of the bundle over time would be a major selling point for VARs targeting EMCs customers with the joint offering. “When customers scale up on EMC, it can be hard to get their boxes talking to each other,” he said. “With this joint offering, as customers scale up they can scale up their storage with no interoperability issues. We have just one platform, so it is automatically interoperable. This offering will have a competitive effect.
“We definitely have a strategy to target EMC customers; they are a significant target for us as an opportunity. For us to grow we need to take a chunk of EMC’s market share.”
However, Nigel Ghent, marketing director at EMC, was unconcerned by the announcement. “If you look at the scalability of the offering there is some limitation in comparison with EMC,” Ghent said. “They can scale to 384TB raw capacity, whereas EMC’s DMX can scale to 1,054TB, so scalability wise we are three times greater.
“3Par has entered into this because it gives it a bigger player in NetApp, but it is still a very small player in the market, and its support is outsourced. When this is compared with the global support force of EMC, as well as the capacity issues, it does not even come close.”
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