66: GreyBeards talk Midrange storage part 2, with Sean Kinney, Sr. Dir. Midrange Storage Mkt, Dell EMC

Sponsored by:

Dell EMC Midrange Storage

In this episode we talk with Sean Kinney (@SeanRKinney14), senior director, midrange storage marketing at Dell EMC.  Howard and I have both known Sean for a number of years now. Sean has had multiple roles in the IT industry, doing various marketing and management duties at multiple vendors. He’s back at Dell EMC now and wanted to take on opportunity to discuss Dell EMC midrange storage with us.

As you probably already know, Dell EMC midrange storage dominates their market and has done so for a number of years now. Currently, Dell EMC midrange storage has 2X the revenue of any other competitor.

This is the third time (Dell) EMC has been on our show (see our EMCWorld2015 summary podcast with Chad Sakac, and  Talk with Pierluca Chiodelli sponsored podcast).  Since our last podcast, there’s been plenty of happenings at Dell EMC midrange storage.

Dell EMC Unity and SC storage news

Dell EMC Unity storage has recently added new file data reduction and file sync replication functionality. And a short time ago, Dell EMC came out with an AFA version of their SC Series storage.

With the two midrange product lines there’s been some cross fertilization. That is Dell EMC is starting to take some of the best features from one solution and applying it to the other.

For example,

  • SC series has had its Health Check offering since Compellent days. This is a PS, offered by Dell EMC, that reviews the health of your data center’s SC storage, DR plans, backup activity, IO performance, etc. and provides recommendations as to how to improve the overall storage environment. The Health Check PS is now also available for Unity storage.
  • Unity storage has had its CloudIQ management/monitoring solution since December of 2016. CloudIQ is a big data analytics-remote management, software-as-a-service offering, running in the cloud that allows customers to manage/monitor Unity storage from anywhere. With SC Series’ latest, 7.3 code update, SC storage is also supported under CloudIQ.

We also discussed some of the inherent advantages to SC Series storage, such as their forever software licensing, storage federation/scale out clusters and economical $/GB pricing.

Sean mentioned some of the Future Proof guarantees that Dell EMC offers on both Unity and SC series storage. These include hardware investment protection, data-in-place upgrades, data reduction guarantees, etc.

The podcast runs ~20 minutes. Sean has been around the storage for a long time now and is very knowledgeable about Dell EMC Midrange storage as well as competitive solutions. Howard and I have talked with Sean at a number of industry events in the past and it was fun to talk with him again.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Sean Kinney, Senior Director,  Dell EMC Midrange Storage Marketing

Sean Kinney is an industry leader in the storage and data protection market, with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry.

Currently, he is the Senior Director for midrange storage marketing at Dell EMC.  He spent the first 10 years of his career at EMC, and then held positions including VP and General Manager of online backup at Acronis and Senior Director, Storage Marketing at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

Sean has a B.A. from Dartmouth College and a M.B.A from the University of Michigan.

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