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To: Boplicity who wrote (5258)	1/3/2002 3:02:23 PM
From: jhg_in_kc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13815

Bo and All, FYI EMC's storage management architecture and software solution may do for storage management what Microsoft Windows did for personal computing: Establish a de facto management standard in a market that has resisted standardization for the past 30 years. From 50,000 feet, the EMC approach has several obvious strengths. It is a framework that doesn't labor under the central constraint that has limited the efficacy of other framework products in the market -- namely, the need for the framework vendor to garner the on-going cooperation of third-party hardware and software vendors to facilitate their customers with management capabilities. EMC is simply including its initiative, dubbed WideSky, as part of EMC ControlCenter/Open Integration Components. This means WideSky will be included in all EMC ControlCenter management products as part of this release. It is up to the hardware or software vendors to enable their products for integration with WideSky. Their incentive for doing so is to gain traction in a market where EMC storage enjoys a strong presence. EMC is calling WideSky the Storage Management Middleware. While the effort will likely find critics among long-standing EMC competitors, the truth is that EMC, with its current market position, is uniquely positioned to offer its management framework as a de facto standard. The strategy is the vendor's first foray into the platform-independent software market and will hopefully set the stage for the delivery of other software products developed by the industry giant for use across the heterogeneous environments increasingly present in most business enterprises. EMC introduced WideSky in October 2001. The initial offering will support comprehensive management of traditional EMC platform components, including Symmetrix and CLARiiON arrays, Celerra, and switch products including EMC's own Connectrix, and those of partners Brocade, McData and QLogic. Storage software products already enabled for use with WideSky include: EMC ControlCenter/Open Edition, EMC ControlCenter StorageScope and EMC ControlCenter Replication Manager. This release is able to discover various third-party storage platforms such as those from Compaq, Hitachi/HP/Sun, NetApp and IBM. In these days of budgetary belt-tightening and the need to manage more storage with fewer hands, it is quite possible that customers will drive their preferred vendors to cooperate with the EMC WideSky initiative. In the final analysis, a de facto management standard may not be preferable to an open standard, but storage customers, desperate for an effective storage management solution that can be implemented immediately, may be well-served by the EMC solution.