Rivals EMC and Hewlett-Packard have agreed to expand a
cross-licensing agreement for certain storage system application
programming interfaces (APIs), a move that will eventually allow
the development of storage management software capable of
controlling other vendors' storage devices.
The two companies said that by the beginning of next year, they
will have integrated their respective APIs, enabling HP's devices
to work with EMC's ControlCenter management suite, which includes
SANmanager software, StorageScope, Replication Manager and
PowerPath. All of the software will be enabled through EMC's
WideSky middleware.
"It will give our customers the ability to mix and match more
storage platforms than before," Don Swatik, EMC's vice-president of
alliances and information sciences, said.
Customer pressure over increasingly complex heterogeneous storage
networks drove HP and EMC to exchange the APIs, executives from
both companies said.
Experts say the API exchange is little more than window dressing on
the agreement signed by EMC and Compaq last November to share APIs.
HP spokesman Roger Archibald said the API exchange does, however,
add HP's OpenView SAN management software and its Virtual Array
products.
Under the terms of the agreement, EMC is licensing APIs to HP to
support auto discovery and control functions of EMC's high-end
Symmetrix array and midrange Clariion server. HP is licensing APIs
to EMC to support the same functions in HP's StorageWorks Virtual
Array systems and the StorageWorks XP systems, which HP resells
from Hitachi Data Systems.
Arun Teneja, a storage analyst at Enterprise Storage Group said the
API exchange bodes especially well for EMC's WideSky software, part
of the company's AutoIS initiative to manage storage hardware and
software from competitors.
"This would be a major step forward for EMC," Teneja said. "There's
been so much doubt and uncertainty in the marketplace [about]
whether or not EMC's competitors would in fact do this exchange.
The fact that these guys are moving forward shows EMC must have
quelled their fears that this was a Trojan horse and that they were
going to try to use it to steal all their business."
The API exchange will allow the two companies' storage subsystems
to gather information about and perform functions with each other,
including configurations, performance statistics, remote snapshots
and clone, and to create and configure logical unit number (LUN)
masking and device masking and settings. It will also allow
administrators to build LUNs to create topology maps.
In addition, the companies will define cooperative support levels
so that end users of the respective storage management products can
be assured that each vendor will provide support for its
configurations.