You’re now deep into a multi-part blog series on the background behind an entirely new storage product from EMC: the VNXe, code named “Neo”.
In part 1, I described the context of the project, and what specific problems we were trying to solve.
In part 2, I touched briefly on some of the rather unique design assumptions that went into the product and its ecosystem.
And in this post, I’d like to explore how the expanded notion of “system” fundamentally changed just about everything we did around the product: how it was sold, supported, upgraded, etc.
To Recap A Bit
VNXe is aimed at a specific user that EMC hasn’t targeted in the past: the “IT generalist”.
This person has a lot on their plate: the last thing they want to do is become a storage specialist. The product is designed in such a way that you really don’t have to know anything about storage to use it – and anything that you might need to know along the way is presented in the context of what you’re trying to get done.
No need for lengthy and expensive training or certification. No need to become intimate with manuals or documentation. No need to go searching on various databases or forums for an answer to your question. It’s that different.
As we’ll see, this resulted in a strong convergence between the management environment (known as Unisphere) and the way that support, education and other product-related services are delivered.
The Unisphere Experience
One notable aspect of how Unisphere works vs. traditional approaches is the “everything in context” philosophy.
Say that you wanted to stand up some storage for Microsoft Exchange. The dialogue would be around “how many mailboxes, and how do you want them protected?” instead of LUNs, RAID groups, et. al.
The activity is presented in a very natural language reflects what you’re actually trying to get done, e.g. VMware-speak if that’s what you’re doing. The terms and concepts line up with the other documentation you’re reading.
EMC’s best practices for storage and protection (subtly different for Exchange 2003 vs. 2010) are automatically implemented. If you do want to go deeper and get more granular, there’s a place to click where you have a bit more control if you feel the need, but there’s usually never a need to go there.
Similarly for VMware environments, the dialogs are presented in VMware-speak. EMC’s best practices are automatically implemented, and if you want to go deeper, you can. At the launch event, we had a 10-year-old show off some of the capabilities, just as an example. The reality is not that far off.
The Right Kind Of Help At The Right Time
This “what are you trying to get done?” perspective reflects to problem management as well. There’s a simple status indicator that says whether something needs your attention. Click on it, and a visual guide comes up that shows you where the problem is (e.g. you’ve got a failed power supply). You then get a choice as to what you’d like to do: learn more, replace it yourself, or – as a last resort -- having someone do it for you.
And the product helps you every step of the way.
If you’d like to do it yourself, a nice animated step-by-step visual appears, showing you in clear graphical detail exactly what steps to take to remove and replace the module. Indeed, I am told there’s a mapping of 30,000 potential array events (yikes!) to about 170 clear processes – all along the same lines. Sure beats googling error codes :-)
Compare this to the traditional “silo” approach: go to one place for array status, go to another place for array configuration, go to yet another place to look at logs, go to several other places to read documentation, go to many other places to search various online forums, and so on.It’s a very different model.
Access to software updates, user forums, trouble tickets, chat lines, additional documentation – all from the exact same interface. The team calls this approach “up the support funnel” – here’s a quick answer, if you need more, click here, if you need even more, click here.
Heck, I wish all my personal technology worked like that!
What’s the impact of completely e-engineering the end-to-end support environment? Massive, it turns out.
Usability studies done with artificially generated problems resulted in an overall 70% reduction in problem resolution time as compared to current best-in-class, not to mention 93% fewer cuss words being uttered by test subjects during the support process :-)
There’s more – this re-engineered approach to end user support has reduced our cost-to-support by 90% as compared to previous best practice. That’s a cost savings we can pass on to our partners and ultimately our customers.It’s hard to get a flavor for just how powerful Unisphere (and VNXe) can be in making storage-related IT tasks as painless as possible, especially if you’re an IT generalist.
A while back, I spent about an hour on the UI going through different parts of it. I was mightily impressed. Personally, I think it sets a new design standard in the storage industry – see what you think!
Considering The Partner
The vast majority of these more modest arrays go through an indirect partner, reseller or other route to market. Early on, we realized that we had to invest considerable effort in making their lives easy - and profitable - as well.
The first hurdle any partner has with a new product – from anyone – is up-front investment in learning about the product. Not only did we create a new category in EMC’s Velocity program for partners who just want to sell products like these from EMC (and no others), we created an online onboarding process that takes about three to eight hours (video and text) to get through.
Make it through that, and you’re good to propose and sell the product – and there’s ready help beyond that if you need it. The installation guide, for example, is now down to a mere 14 pages. Ordering is down to five clicks. And there’s much more.
Again, time is the most precious asset here for everyone, and I think we’ve gone above and beyond to minimize the time investment required for our partners. To me, it's a new design standard in the storage industry.
The second hurdle is integrating the vendor’s support experience with the one being provided by the partner. And there’s a wide range here – from partners who want to simply do pass-through of what EMC provides, to more involved approach where the partner invests in a tailored support experience for their customers.
The VNXe/Unisphere support process model is extremely extensible – we have the potential over time to accommodate each partner’s preferred approach -- although not at the outset. Ideally, the support processes would be designed to adapt to partner requirements, and not the other way around.Upgrades and additional purchases are handled using the same philosophy – at one end of the spectrum there are attractive, integrated processes provided from EMC, or – if needed we can easily integrate with the partner’s preferred process.
Indeed, we did almost as much “usability testing” around these vastly improved partner processes as we did with the end user experience.
And the indication so far is that we’ve set an entirely new standard around making EMC and the VNXe “easy to do business with”.
It’s All About “System”, Isn’t It?
Inevitably, most product companies will put the majority of their effort into the product itself, and treat the “everything else” as separate, individual processes owned by other parts of the vendor organization.
What’s really new here is the process redesign completely re-oriented around the specific needs of the end user (our proverbial IT generalist), and the partners that serve them. Having the ability to create entirely new approaches has resulted in an entirely new standard in this class of product.You have to see one to really appreciate what’s been done here.
As Doug Wood puts it “doing simple is really hard, doing really hard is actually quite easy”. I couldn’t agree more.
In the next installment, I’ll share my thoughts as to how some of these innovations might affect the broader storage marketplace going forward.
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