I only recently found out that EMC acquired ScaleIO in July 2013, I think this was at least a remarkable acquisition. If you look at the main product offering from ScaleIO, “ECS” which stand for Elastic Converged Storage, you will probably understand what I mean.
The following is taken from the ScaleIO website:
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ScaleIO ECS is a software-only solution that uses application hosts’ local disks to realize a virtual SAN that is comparable to or better than external SAN storage, but at a fraction of the cost and complexity. ECS natively supports all the leading Linux distributions and hypervisors and works agnostically with any SSD, HDD, and network. http://www.scaleio.com/product
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So in short; it pools the local disk capacity of servers and presents it as a virtual SAN.
Apart from the support for different platforms, that is the same description VMware uses to describe VSAN, which currently is in Beta phase.
It puzzles me why EMC pays around 250 million dollars for a technology they practically already have (EMC being the owner of VMware). It is comparable to VMware acquiring a storage array vendor, it looks like inhouse competition.
One explanation could be that EMC has seen the light and goes SDS, another theory is; they just wanted it off the market because it harms their current business. The EMC Evangelist “Chad Sakac” tries to explain the reasoning behind the acquisition in a blog.
When EMC took over ScaleIO they kept using the ScaleIO Twitter account, they just renamed it to EMCScaleIO. If you scroll back to the time before the takeover you can still see the pre-EMC tweets from the original account.
Below is a nice tweet from before the takeover, it now sort of looks like the owner of Jurassic Park is telling us we need to replace the dinosaurs in our datacenter.
