Last week PC Week article:
Storage titans look to expanding markets
By John S. Mccright and Sonia R. Lelii, PC Week Online
July 26, 1999 9:00 AM ET
EMC Corp. is taking steps to cement its role as the leading enterprise storage vendor. But IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. aren't about to concede defeat as they ready new storage initiatives of their own.
New products and strategies from all three companies will give IT organizations additional options when deciding how to store fast-growing vaults of data, particularly on the Internet and in Windows NT environments.
EMC continues to stretch beyond its traditional Global 2000 customer base as it targets the mushrooming need for storage by high-volume Internet sites.
While demand for storage from traditional businesses doubles every year, companies doing business on the Web are growing at a much faster rate, according to Forrester Research Inc. The Cambridge, Mass., market researcher found, for instance, that more than one-third of retailers doing business on the Web expect to see at least a tenfold increase in storage capacity in the next two years.
As a result, EMC has dedicated a portion of its sales force to woo Internet companies that may be relatively small in terms of employees and revenues but whose storage needs are rising rapidly.
"Clearly, those are the fastest-growing segments and the most information-intensive," EMC President and CEO Michael Ruettgers said in an interview at the company's headquarters here last week. "Every time someone goes on the Internet, they leave fingerprints, and somebody's collecting all those fingerprints."
When dealing with the multiterabyte data stores of the Internet, managing the storage becomes as important as providing capacity. In that area, EMC is driving the FibreAlliance, a consortium of companies pushing a standard for Fibre Channel-based storage management software. The Internet Engineering Task Force is expected to ratify the alliance's first specification late this year.
EMC is also expanding its footprint in the Windows NT storage market through new products and cooperative development with Microsoft Corp.
This week, EMC will roll out EMC Symmetrix Connect for Windows NT, software that backs up data directly from the disk array without bogging down the server or the LAN. The software, available now, also restores data after a system failure.
EMC is also working with Microsoft to make Windows better suited for the enterprise by extending Microsoft Cluster Server with its own SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) file replication software, EMC officials said. The integrated software should be available later this year, they said.
As it branches out from its traditional base of mainframe and Unix environments, EMC may face more pressure for the high prices it charges for its products. For many customers, it's a question of balancing cost concerns with reliability issues.
Web portal Lycos Inc., for example, is a natural target for EMC. It currently has 18 terabytes of storage, which it expects will compound regularly. The Waltham, Mass., company is evaluating EMC storage hardware but has yet to decide if it's worth the premium price.
"If they are going to break into this market, they need to offer deals at a lower price," said Ron Rainville, Lycos' director of operations.
Some companies that have been burned by inefficient storage solutions no longer consider price a barrier. AdForce Inc., a Cupertino, Calif., company that places advertising on Web pages, looked into an EMC Symmetrix system a year ago after it lost data when it had a problem with its Sun storage devices.
"When you lose data, you can't go out and buy it again--it's gone," said Joe Lindsay, director of operations for AdForce. "At that point, [EMC] didn't seem so expensive."
Lindsay opted for the high availability and load balancing features he saw in Symmetrix after EMC salespeople convinced him their systems would be cheaper to operate in the long run.
As EMC grows, it is bumping up against renewed efforts by IBM and Sun to grab market share. Although both companies partner with EMC on drive components and other technology, each also competes with EMC.
IBM this week will unveil Enterprise Storage Server, a major new direction in its high-end storage story. Code-named Shark, it is the first disk array to use IBM's Seascape storage architecture.
A key feature of the Seascape architecture is its ability to be upgraded as new chips or components are developed, thus preserving customer investment, said Frank Elliott, vice president of marketing and strategy in IBM's Storage Systems Division, in San Jose, Calif.
Enterprise Storage Server, which scales from 420GB to 11.2 terabytes of capacity and runs at 30,000 I/Os per second, supports NT, Unix, AS/400 and the S390 platforms. The server borrows mainframe technology such as the ability to provide parallel access to volumes, which means users requesting the same data won't have to wait for it, officials said.
Sun next year plans to introduce an as-yet-unnamed storage appliance that will initially target high-performance computing, data warehousing and high-transaction applications, said Jeff Allen, vice president of network storage at the Palo Alto, Calif., company.
Earlier this month, Sun released a draft specification for its Jiro storage management platform, formerly known as StoreX. The Java-based platform will enable storage software developers to write their applications to a single Java standard, thus speeding innovation, Allen said.
Sun is readying new storage management services for its own hardware. Next month, the company will announce Instant Image, software that makes data on one device available to all devices on the network without interfering with system operations. A data mirroring tool called Remote Dual Copy is due later in the year.
Bob Gauthier
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