barrons
Disrupting the storage industry
Not far below programming services on McKinley's shopping list are computing
hardware and data storage. And within data storage he mentions something
called storage virtualization.
Virtualization promises to free customers who are now locked into a single
established vendor, such as EMC and Network Appliance. Historically, the
software that interfaced between computers and their disk drives came only as
integral parts of expensive storage products.
Now products,
known as
storage
gateways,
allow
customers to
mix and match
hardware. So
while EMC's
Celerra
Gateway only
hooks into
EMC's own
disk arrays,
IBM's 300G
gateway,
introduced last
year, works
with storage
products from
both Compaq
and IBM, and
it will soon
connect with those from Hitachi Data Systems. Thereafter, IBM will take
virtualization still further with the Storage Tank, a system that will create a
company-wide file system. Like the 300G, Storage Tank will be a computer
running Linux software on Intel processors, sitting somewhere on the network.
The system will happily work with computer software from H-P, Sun or
Microsoft.
On Wednesday, a dozen computing firms committed themselves to a
multivendor future when they endorsed a standard for managing storage
networks, dubbed "Bluefin." EMC was among them, and it may find more
interoperability in standards like Bluefin than in its own proposed interoperability
project, called WideSky. Direct rivals are loath to join a project like WideSky,
which is so closely identified with EMC's own wares, observes Mike Zisman,
manager of IBM's new storage software unit.
EMC's need for an arm's-length software business helped give credibility to last
week's rumor that EMC was performing due diligence on a potential acquisition
of BMC Software. That firm would give EMC multivendor credibility, along
with storage software whose product manager recently moved from BMC to
EMC. An EMC spokesman declined to comment. |
