EMChas unveiled its long-anticipated storage
virtualisation technology, which the company said will allow users
to manage its own arrays - and high-end boxes from major
competitors - through a single interface.
"This is finally EMC giving in to the fact that storage is going
to become virtualised," said Nancy Hurley, an analyst at Enterprise
Strategy Group.
EMC said at Storage Networking World in Orlando that its
product, called Storage Router, is a combination of so called
"intelligent switches and directors" from Cicso Systems, Brocade
Communications and McData and EMC's own firmware. The switch
manufacturers gave EMC proprietary application program interfaces
(API) to which it could write its firmware.
The switches are among a relatively new breed of storage
technology that uses application-specific integrated circuits to
crack open data packets, read the information inside and route the
data.
Robert Sadowski, a product marketing manager at EMC, said that
the company will eventually write its code to a standard API called
Fabric Application Interface that is now being developed by the
International Committee for Information Technology Standards.
"It's just the right thing to do for the customer," he said.
EMC first tipped its hand about plans for Storage Router at its
annual users conference last April, saying it would be releasing a
beta version to users the following quarter. Yesterday, EMC said
the router is in beta now but will not be generally available until
the first half of 2005.
When it does become available, EMC said, the Storage Router will
be able to perform network-based volume control, data migration and
point-in-time copies between arrays.
EMC said Storage Router firmware runs on Brocade Communications
Systems' AP7420 switch, all of Cisco Systems' MDS line of
director-class switches and all intelligent switches and directors
from McData.
The product will also work with EMCs own Symmetrix and Clarriion
products as well as Hitachi Data System's 9900 series,
Hewlett-Packard's EVA line and IBM's Enterprise Storage Server,
also known as Shark.
Hurley said EMC chose to introduce virtualisation - by creating
an abstraction layer between applications servers and storage -
because it's in the network.
"Users [in a recent survey] told us they wanted suppliers to put
certain features on a switch. Anything to do with data management
is one of them."
EMC said Storage Router is able to perform port level processing
at a rate of 30,000 to 40,000 I/O per second and is highly scalable
by adding more processing blades to the switches.
"It's a much more elegant model for virtualisation because it
fits into an existing storage network," Sadowski said.
Lucas Mearian writes for Computerworld