Singapore lands EMC development lab

Database News - Wednesday December 19, 2007

STORAGE / LAB FACILITIES COME TO ASIA

Singapore lands EMC development lab

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

EMC has opened its South Asia Development Laboratory in Singapore as part of its continuing commitment to investing in research and development in what is its fastest growing region with growth in Asia-Pacific, reaching 26 percent in only the first nine months of 2007.

The 29,000 square foot facility is part of a S$250 million (5.7 billion baht) investment into Singapore over the next five years.

The South Asia Development Labs (SADL) includes EMC's first eLab outside of North America, which works at certifying different combinations of hardware, network and software. Rather than simple testing, the engineers have to precisely identify the cause of each failure so that that the partner, such as Brocade, Cisco or a drive vendor, can then get to work solving the problem.

EMC has just started a relationship with Seagate where EMC engineers actually sit and work in the same room with engineers at Seagate so that they can work on problems together. This is the first time Seagate has allowed this level of access to any of its partners. A similar agreement with Hitachi will commence soon.

For the customer, SADL will offer tours so that data centre managers and CIOs can see first hand the various solutions and remove the doubt when specifying a certain system for any given task. EMC's other eLab, in Boston, currently conducts over 500 customer tours a year.

Presiding over the opening ceremony, Singapore's Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang spoke of the huge growth in information due to user generated content through companies such as YouTube or Second Life. IDC expects the amount of information to increase six-fold by 2010, and managing this growth will have tremendous implications for government, industry and academia alike.

Singapore, already home to Hitachi, Seagate, Hoya and others in the hard drive industry, is also the region's hub for submarine Internet cables and Lim said that the country will leverage this advantage to play a major role in the rapidly expanding digital universe.

EMC vice chairman William J Teuber Jr spoke of the changes in the industry, from technology centric computing to information centric computing, the trends towards more regulation and energy efficiency and the demise of planned downtime. However, the biggest trend was how the creation of information has shifted from being created by organisations to individuals.

"Seventy percent of the information growth will be created by individuals, but it will be the organisations who will have to deal with it," he said.

Indeed, EMC itself has evolved from being a storage company to an information infrastructure company that stores, protects and helps organisations to leverage information.

EMC Documentum is all about content management and dealing with the growth of data that is not in databases. Last year EMC bought RSA, the world's largest security company to help secure that information.

The entire process of getting an EMC system up and running has also been streamlined. Today, in Asia-Pacific, a customer can expect to have a typical system delivered within 10 days of placing an order and for it to go from power-up to production in as little as 15 minutes.

Elsewhere in the region, EMC has recently committed to investing one billion US dollars in mainland China and has R&D in Bangalore, India and logistics operations in Hong Kong.

EMC Thailand country manager Thada Savetsila said that the proximity of the SADL would allow prospective clients to visit the facility much easier than if they had to make the trip to Boston and see first hand the permutations of capital expenditure versus operational expenditure given different configurations.

Thada was due to launch the EMC Academic Initiative in Thailand this month. The project, organised in collaboration with Software Park Thailand, will provide universities with vendor-neutral courseware to allow them to teach data management and data warehousing to meet the acute skill shortage Thailand is already beginning to face. A professional course will also be offered through Software Park Thailand's training facilities.

But while the course will be vendor neutral, Thada did say that EMC is looking into donating some of its hardware to some universities for the students to put theories into practice.

EMC has a strong indirect investment in Thailand. Two of its largest board suppliers, Celestia and Benchmark, manufacture printed circuit boards here to supply to EMC.

The outlook for EMC in Thailand is still very strong with a rapidly normalising political situation. Thada said that the policy statements of all major political parties point to investment in education and in infrastructure, which will help grow the demand for storage. He said that Thailand has a particular need to manage the data that still needs to be worked out.

As for the currency, Thada said that he wished to see a stable baht, and said that whether it stabilised at a higher or lower level than today was not a problem as long as it did not fluctuate too much and businesses could plan for it.

Bangkok Post