EMC has signed up Fujitsu Siemens Computer (FSC) as a
reseller of EMC disc storage products, only days after Fujitsu
announced the world's first 300GB enterprise class hard drive. The
extended supply agreement between EMC and FSC will last through to
2008.
Adrian Hammerstein, FSC's president and chief executive officer,
said: "EMC's networked storage systems and software are key
components of our business critical computing solutions."
He stressed that EMC and FSC are working together "at all levels,
from engineering to sales and service".
Garry Owen, head of enterprise marketing for FSC, said: "We
certainly do use drives from Fujitsu. The EMC agreement is for
drive subsystems or entire systems like Symmetrix. We use Fujitsu
drives as part of the family from notebooks to PCs and
servers."
FSC does use Fujitsu drives but in the case of storage
products opts for EMC's Clariion, resold as FibreCAT, and also
Symmetrix, Celerra file servers and Centera fixed content
arrays.
"Fujitsu storage systems in some senses are similar to EMC's. We
don't market them as a rule in Europe for two reasons," said
Owen. "The first is to do with an inherited Siemens/EMC contract.
Fujitsu owns half of FSC with Siemens owning the other half.
Siemens negotiated a supply contract with EMC before Fujitsu came
on the scene and FSC inherited the contract."
The second reason is that although "Fujitsu storage subsystem
products are world-class, the difference is they're really designed
to work with other Fujitsu products, revolving mostly around
mainframes. The EMC products are designed for heterogeneous
environments," which is the market FSC sells into.
Chris Mellor writes for Techworld.com