EMC snaps up ex Symantec veep to rule new HPC skunkworks

EMC has recruited an ex-Symantec exec to lord it over its Emerging Technology Products division. His product brief includes "hybrid Cloud Gateways and High Performance Computing storage" which is fine ... except EMC hasn't got any such products.

Chirantan “CJ” Desai will be the president of the newly-formed Emerging Technology Products division and report to David Goulden, EMC's president and COO. Goulden said: "CJ and this new division will bring an elevated level of focus and scale for converting the full potential of key emerging technologies into the most powerful solutions for our customers."

EMC's canned statement says: "Initially, the Emerging Technology Products Division will focus on all-flash scale-out enterprise storage arrays (through XtremIO), server-side storage hardware and software (through ScaleIO, XtremSF PCIe cards and the XtremSW Suite), hybrid Cloud Gateways and High Performance Computing storage."

These last two items don't currently feature in EMC's product roster. It does have a Cloud Tiering Appliance that "optimises network-attached storage (NAS) infrastructure by moving inactive data to lower-cost tiers of storage, reclaiming primary storage capacity.”

This product sits in EMC's Backup and Recovery Systems Division.

It also has its "VNX High-Performance Computing (HPC) Series, a preconfigured hardware and software appliance. Designed to simplify Terascala Lustre deployments where parallel I/O for HPC applications is required, according to EMC the VNX HPC series “delivers tens of gigabits per second (GB/s) bandwidth and tens of petabytes of capacity.”

In emerging technology product terms that looks like a legacy product using, as it does, a VNX base. It's also in the unified storage product division.

It's interesting that EMC has gone to an outsider to run the ETP division instead of promoting an inside staffer. “New blood: new mindset” perhaps? This is like EMC appointing ex-Microsoftie Amitabh Srivastava to run its Advanced Software division; he's the ViPR man, by the way.

Desai comes to EMC from being exec veep of information management at Symantec.

El Reg's storage desk understands from inside EMC that the businesses which are just starting out and are not producing substantial revenue yet will be incubated by Desai. The organisation will run itself like a set of start-ups; EMC's own formalised skunkworks, perhaps. ®