EMC man defends Federation model against 'poop flingers'

EMC's president for global systems engineering Chad Sakac claims it is 'intellectually lazy' to not understand the Federation's open principles

EMC's systems engineer chief has branded those who don't understand the open nature of the firm's Federation set-up "intellectually lazy" as he defended the model against industry "poop flingers".

In a post on his personal blog, EMC's global systems engineer president Chad Sakac said recent product news has prompted industry chatter suggesting there are conflicts in its Federation model - the collective name given to EMC, VMware and Pivotal.

Earlier this month, EMC announced the availability of its VSPEX BLUE product - a hyperconverged infrastructure appliance powered by VMware's EVO: RAIL and EMC's own software.

This, Sakac admitted, prompted "some speculation" about whether the new product would tread on the toes of EMC's existing converged infrastructure product ScaleIO.

"There is some speculation in the industry about whether EMC's embrace of VSAN for the VSPEX Blue vSphere-only hyper-converged appliance means something vis à vis ScaleIO.

"I've had analysts say that the mere existence of VSAN and ScaleIO points to an 'unrecoverable schism' in the federation model," he said.

But he insisted this was not the case at all and that EMC was committed to both offerings.

"EMC backing off from ScaleIO? Nothing could be further from the truth," he said.

"Choice is an important idea and one that EMC fully embraces. ScaleIO plays a critical role in our view of the storage world."

Sakac went on to bemoan people's misunderstanding of the Federation model's open nature.

"I'm getting tired of people not understanding a basic principle of the Federation: we are open at every layer. It's intellectually lazy.

"Yes, it requires a little finesse, a little mental dexterousness, a little sophistication, to comprehend. Yes, it likely makes us easier targets for poop flinging. I don't care about poop flingers. At the root, who wins from the principle of 'open'? The customer. The EMC shareholder."