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

To: Gus who wrote (14267)	5/25/2002 7:29:48 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

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.