EMC, Compaq unite on storage management
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HOPKINTON, MASS. - An agreement EMC announced with Compaq last week should let customers use the same software to manage high-end storage products from both companies. But it appears that customers who want to use one package to manage storage hardware from EMC and vendors other than Compaq might not get so lucky any time soon.
Its deal with Compaq is EMC's latest move to shed a reputation for being overly proprietary, as the company has been forced to change its ways in light of increased competition and tighter IT budgets. By exchanging APIs with one another, EMC and Compaq can supply users with software for managing their respective Symmetrix and StorageWorks Modular Array gear - which together accounts for two-thirds of such products sold in the market. The companies are also expected to expand the agreement to cover their midrange storage gear.
"The good news for everybody is major storage players are playing nice, and the ultimate winner will be clients," says Tony Prigmore, an analyst for consultancy Enterprise Storage Group.
While customers can do basic monitoring of mixed vendor storage environments today with SNMP tools, they've had to resort to separate tools for each vendor's devices to perform more sophisticated management, such as making changes to equipment or initiating data replication.
The EMC-Compaq deal relies on middleware dubbed WideSky that EMC announced a few weeks ago (www.nwfusion.com, DocFinder: 6848). Originally, it appeared the WideSky APIs would be available to any company through EMC's developer's program. But EMC has since said that only makers of similar storage hardware willing to swap APIs can get their hands on WideSky.
"Our position on this will be exactly parallel with what we did with Compaq - we are willing to do API swaps for like-functionality," says Don Swatik, vice president for global alliances at EMC. "It's absolutely critical for other storage companies not only to have a willingness, but also to have substance in their APIs. In the past, other organizations have had nothing to trade."
Sun says that it attempted to swap APIs, but was rebuffed. EMC says Sun was allowed to evaluate software and the two companies started to exchange APIs, but negotiations broke down when Sun could not provide APIs for its StorEdge 9900 array. Sun, which posts the APIs for its midrange T-3 storage products on its Web site, says its agreement with Hitachi Data Systems, the manufacturer of the StorEdge 9900, does not permit Sun to disclose those APIs (sources say that Hitachi and EMC may be trying to work out an API swap).
Meanwhile, IBM executives say the company's Tivoli Storage Manager products are written to open standards such as SNMP. However, IBM also uses special instructions called channel control words to manage the advanced functions of its Enterprise Storage Server (code-named Shark). IBM would not disclose which, if any, vendors it has licensed these instructions to.
Hewlett-Packard says it is willing to share code with other vendors as they request it, but has not formalized anything with EMC.
Observers say EMC's WideSky could, if distributed openly, become a de facto standard given EMC's market leadership. In the past, EMC has made an SNMP management information base for Fibre Channel switches available to others.
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