Douglas, thanks for your observations.
<< this is a marketing ploy>>
That's the part that makes me nervous <g>. So far team B's product vision and market positioning have been more on target than team A.
<<EMC's stance is curious unless it is their intention to "own FC." Somewhat akin to herding cats, don't you think? <G>>>
LOL. Yes i do ! More on EMC:
Data hotels
nwfusion.com
By John Dix
Network World, 11/09/98
I just got back from a strategy briefing at EMC and I have to admit, I'm buying the vision (leaving me to wonder if my finely honed cynicism is losing its edge).
Although many people think of EMC as a disk drive company, the fact is it doesn't make disk drives. It buys them in bulk, packages bunches of them together, adds electronics and stirs in its own software to create massive data stores that not only stockpile data but also help you manage, protect and share it.
What the company advocates is using these beasts to amalgamate storage of multiple enterprise machines. Instead of your mainframes, AS/400s, Unix boxes and NT servers all having their own disk drives, they connect to a redundant, RAID-based EMC storage tower.
The benefits are many. You have one system to manage, rather than a raft of them. You don't have to stitch together a bunch of safety nets to back up all those different boxes. And, most importantly, you centralize your data.
Centralizing data does a couple of things. For one, it simplifies sharing information among servers. Today, every time Processor A needs something from Processor G, G has to expend cycles to pull stuff up from the disk and shunt it across the LAN to A. Instead, if you attach all your systems to an EMC tower you can share data by simply moving it from one disk to another inside the EMC cabinet. The company estimates that some 30% of corporate LAN traffic is system-to-system data sharing.
Another benefit of centralizing data is that it eliminates data islands, which has implications for databases and data warehousing. Now you can go to sleep at night knowing where all of the company's core data is and knowing it's safe and sound!
(What's more, if you are increasingly relying on NT, warts and all, at least you can take solace in the fact that your data is secure, even if the operating system doesn't yet live up to enterprise standards.)
Worried about a single point of failure? You should be when you're talking about installing systems capable of storing up to three trillion bytes of information...right? Well, you may not have to worry because EMC has all sorts of safeguards built in. If, for example, an EMC Symmetrix system sees an individual drive start to heat up or get a little cranky, it offloads the contents to another drive in the same cabinet, takes down the offending device and calls home to EMC's management facility (which is online 24x7).
Not that things should go wrong...but they could. So, in-house testing is done. It involves baking and freezing all the electronics while shaking them to death, then packing the components into cabinets with disk drives and putting them through eight more days of hot house and ice box testing. Most of what can go wrong will go wrong in the testing process. Consequently, customers take delivery of highly reliable systems.
Customers attach these systems to enterprise servers using a variety of EMC interfaces, all of which are certified as compatible in the company's labs. Ultimately, these different flavor interfaces will be replaced by industry standard Fibre Channel Storage Area Network gear.
At that point, the picture for EMC customers will look something like this: desktop clients attached to data center servers via an Ethernet, token ring or Internet cloud, and the servers attached to EMC storage systems via a Fibre Channel cloud. Since the servers are mostly centralized, the Fibre Channel network is contained in the data center.
Jim Rothnie, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Technical Officer, says the next goal will be to migrate the storage systems into the cloud. He says EMC has one customer that takes delivery of a 3-terabyte machine every month. Integrating the new box into the system architecture involves a slew of manual tasks such as, telling the other boxes the capacity has been added and migrating data into the device.
In the future, software will automate all of that. If Rothnie has his way you'll be able to wheel an EMC box in, plug it into the SAN (what EMC calls the Enterprise Storage Network) and turn it on. The rest will happen automatically. Same with servers, attach the front end to the LAN for connection to clients and the back end to the SAN. Presto.
That may be a few years away, but the goal is a noble one, and not unreasonable. For now, the company has its work cut out for it trying to convince the world that shared storage is a good thing.
It sounds good to me. |
