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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nikole Wollerstein who wrote (13095)	9/3/2001 4:05:48 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

Hitachi continues to fall behind in functionality. HDS set a record of sort in vaporware by announcing a few months ago that in a few months it was going to announce its virtualization strategy with products that were going to be available in 18-24 months!!! Even IBM and Compaq had enough sense of propriety to keep their vaporware within a loose 12-18-month time frame. In particular, HDS' path provisioning sounds suspiciously like Dynamic Multi-Pathing. EMC co-developed its very successful PowerPath product (25,000+ licenses in 3+ years) in 1998 with Conley Software, a small American company which it later acquired. This is clearly the acquisition model that HDS is emulating. Unfortunately, large Japanese conglomerates do not have a very good track record of buying small American companies and keeping the key employees of those companies. Below are sketches of Hitachi's virtualization strategy. The next post details the key elements of EMC's competing strategy. I think the 9/10 product announcement will shed some more light on the progress of that strategy. Hitachi Hitches Horse to Virtualized Storage By Tim Stammers August 24, 2001 Hitachi Data Systems Ltd will throw its hat into the storage virtualization ring next month when it launches management software intended as a platform for its own and third-party efforts in the sector. HDS is the last of the five largest suppliers of SAN storage arrays to reveal its virtualization plans publicly. EMC Corp, Compaq Computer Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp have already done so. HDS now faces an extended sprint to catch up with its rivals, which apart from IBM are either shipping virtualization technology or have promised to do so by the end of next year at the latest. *Until HDS ships its own products, which it says will not happen for another 18 to 24 months, the company will rely on third-party virtualization suppliers.* The management software that HDS will launch next month has been engineered to make life easier for those third-party suppliers by including an API to simplify the integration of their products with HDS's hardware. Virtualization is an imprecise term that covers a wide range of systems broadly intended to allow storage resources to be easily pooled. HDS's chief technologist and vice president Hubert Yoshida said the company's long-term virtualization plans revolve around path provisioning -the connection of applications to disk or tape resources. We're looking towards path provision. EMC calls it [virtualization] storage automation, but the whole idea is to simplify the connection of applications to data. Virtualization is the aggregation of volumes, but more important is the provisioning of paths - without users being aware of what is going on below, in the network," he said. Yoshida said HDS has adopted an in-band rather than out-of-band architecture for its forthcoming software. In-band systems introduce an extra server to a storage network through which data is directed. They have the advantage that storage traffic can be examined down to block level and decisions can be made based on the application associated with a data flow. Also, unlike out-of-band systems, they do not need complex integration with agents running in devices such as HBAs to keep tabs on data flows. In-band systems however risk becoming a bottleneck choking storage data flows. "In truth, I believe that eventually there'll be a hybrid approach," Yoshida said. The HDS technologist said that will come when HBA network integration is improved, and data such as nameserver information from SAN switches is easier to access. Compaq earlier this month publicized detailed and ambitious storage management plans, and said its Versastor out-of-band virtualization software will ship sometime next year. Versastor was previously expected to ship at the end of this year. IBM announced its Storage Tank virtualization product last year, but has still not given a shipment date. EMC has said that it will ship its out-of-band virtuali-zation software in stages over the next twelve months. HP this summer bought StorageApps, a start-up with shipping and implemented virtualization software. Virtualization threatens to commoditize storage hardware by allowing heterogeneous storage arrays to work together, ending vendor lock-in. Yoshida said that HDS intends to develop its virtualization technology to do exactly this - to work with other suppliers' hardware. Unsurprisingly for a senior executive at a company which relies on hardware sales for a huge part of its income, Yoshida denied there is any risk of commoditization. "I don't think that'll happen. There's more to availability than just plain RAID. There's cache management, pre-emptive copying and rebuilding of arrays and other features. And you may have more things dependent on an array's performance," he said. HDS's creation of an API for third-party use is part of an overall move towards openness in what is still a very proprietary industry. HDS's hardware is already supported by the start-up virtualization software on the market. Those suppliers have however had to link their products to HDS's kit using SNMP links originally intended for systems management use. That is a laborious process, Yoshida said. Although EMC launched its first APIs for its Symmetrix arrays in 1999, Yoshida dismissed these as available only to ISVs that play nicely with EMC. "We certainly can't get them," he said. That approach to sharing is by no means limited to EMC however. "While EMC remains proprietary why would I want to share? When there's a standard that EMC will support, so will we," Yoshida said. The management software which HDS will launch next month is called High Command, and will go at least some way to plugging a gaping hole in the company's product line-up. It will deliver a browser-based rather than client-server-based management system, giving "an administrator's view, rather than an engineer's view of a system," HDS said. tim.stammers@computerwire.com