Posted by Nick Mehta on Fri, Dec 19, 2008 @ 01:09 PM
TheRegister reportedthat EMC is shutting down its main (Belgium) development center for its archive storage offering, the EMC Centera.
While EMC denies that this means the end of life for EMC Centera, it's certainly made a number of EMC archive customers nervous:
Taken together, these executive moves and the closing of the Mechelen Centera development center suggest that the Centera product could be approaching its end of life.
So what does a customer do when their archive storage is EOLed? They are forced to find a new storage vendor and migrate all of that data (often terabytes worth) to the new platform. For cash and time-strapped IT departments, this can means hundreds of thousands of dollars of unplanned cost and hundreds of hours of unplanned time.
And the fact is that since most customer keep archive data 3, 5, 7 years or more, they will eventually be forced to migrate their data - whether because a vendor EOLs its products or because they need to upgrade to newer storage.
I think this is one of the significant yet subtle benefits of software-as-a-service for email archiving. Clients can be rest assured that their data is always available at a predictable monthly cost without worrying about moving it around constantly.
So EMC Centera customers, we're glad to bail out your Centera with our TARP program.