Intelligent Supervision focuses on the management of heterogeneous storage infrastructures and higher-level storage services. EMC introduced this concept with the October 2001 announcement of several AutoIS foundation products such as EMC ControlCenter (ECC)/Open Edition, ECC StorageScope and ECC Replication Manager.
The basic ECC/OE framework ships free with every Symmetrix. ECC StorageScope and ECC Replication Manager are modules that plug into the ECC/OE framework. EMC reportedly sold 200+ licenses to ECC StorageScope and Replication Manager in 4Q2001 and 800+ licenses in 1Q2002.
This sales ramp is even better than the sales ramp of the Open Systems Symmetrix in 1995 which went from $200M in sales in 1995 to $768M in sales in 1996. This illustrates the value of EMC's large installed base (50,000+ Symms sold during the last 12 years) as it introduces more AutoIS products.
For example, even if you assume that sales ramp slows down eventually, the large Symm installed base of more than 50,000+ units still looks like it is perfectly capable of generating a StorageScope/Replication Manager installed base of 10,000+ licenses in 2 years or less -- roughly around 1,000 to 1,500 licenses a quarter.. If you look at EMC's other bestsellers like PowerPath (40,000+ licenses), SRDF (12,000+ licenses) and TimeFinder (18,000+ licenses), these are very conservative numbers for new software products that are designed to work with EMC and non-EMC hardware.
Here's Joe Tucci on acquisitions:
Speaking at EMC's 2002 analyst day here, Tucci said in order to reach 30% of the company's projected revenue from software the storage giant will look to dip into it's coffer of more than $5 billion to buy any number of software companies.
Tucci did not elaborate on any potential takeover targets, but did say they were looking to expand into the monitoring, replication and data mobility software markets.
"If you look where the highest growth areas in software are, backup grew about 19%, monitoring up about 37% and replication up about 35%," said Tucci. "You can expect us to go after one of those high growth areas."
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A peek at new HW/SW products coming out in the next 6-12 months:
One of the more intriguing new products EMC executives discussed is a low-end model of the Clariion that will be manufactured by Dell Computer Corp. EMC didn't delve into much detail on this, but described it generally as a device that combines SAN and NAS, uses low-cost ATA disk drives, and runs with an Intel-based processor. It will be "Windows-compatible" but will be based on EMC-developed software...
....The next generation of Symmetrix, the company's flagship high-end array, will include a non-blocking interconnect and a fully parallel architecture, said Dave Donatelli, EVP of storage platforms operations.
At the midrange, EMC is developing a "multipersonality" Clariion box that will be able to host Symmetrix blades, so it will be able to run Symmetrix applications like SRDF.
Another system, code-named Celeriion, combines the Celerra NAS head-end with Clariion, allowing either Clariion or Symmetrix storage arrays behind it.....
......On the software front, EMC in "the next three to four quarters" will introduce several new elements under the AutoIS umbrella -- including EMC's version of virtualization software for heterogeneous SANs, said Chris Gahagan, SVP of storage infrastructure software, who recently joined EMC from BMC Software Inc.
[EMC is one of only 3 vendors developing out-of-band virtualization appliances. The other vendors are Compaq (Versastor) and StoreAge. Compaq's oft-delayed Versastor is turning out to be a turkey while StoreAge's appears to have lost its most promising customer (HDS) to IBM. In the end, there may be only one.]
"No single scheme delivers virtualization today," Gahagan said. "Other vendors are following the 'big bang' theory of virtualization. You have to virtualize everywhere."
EMC's virtualization strategy will be to "virtualize different layers" -- on the host, in the network fabric, and on the storage array. Gahagan said EMC's storage arrays are already virtualized pools of storage, and that the next release of EMC ControlCenter will include a policy-based storage provisioning tool that will be able to provision storage in other vendors' arrays.
EMC will also introduce host-based software that will provide "many-to-many mapping of server-to-storage arrays." It will extend its PowerPath software -- which intelligently connects servers to storage arrays -- to other storage platforms. Currently, PowerPath is available only for Clariion and Symmetrix.
[PowerPath installed base is more than 40,000 licenses]
Meanwhile, indicating that Veritas Software Corp. is squarely in its sights, EMC will be rolling out backup software that taps the trend toward using low-cost disk as a backup medium instead of tape. Another feature on tap is a data migration utility for heterogeneous storage networks.
"We want to be a one-stop source of storage software for businesses of all sizes, regardless of the hardware platforms they are running on," said Erez Ofer, EVP of EMC's open software solutions group. "Those are our marching orders." EMC expects software to account for 30 percent of its sales by the end of 2004; currently, software is 22 percent of revenues.
Ofer also described a new feature he called EMCLink, which will let storage devices "phone home" to tap into a knowledge base of EMC and its partners in order to troubleshoot problems. He didn't provide a date for when EMCLink would be launched.....
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