Competition is heating up in the storage management race.
EMC Corp., began its push into the world of storage management on Monday with the launch of its AutoIS storage management strategy, a new set of products and services that the storage giant said can manage not only its own storage systems, but systems from competitors such as IBM, Hitachi Data Systems and Sun Microsystems.
The Hopkinton-based company is betting this strategy, which represents the largest single research and development effort in EMC's history, will drive revenue growth.
EMC announced earlier this year that it would put 75% of its research and development budget -- roughly $750 million -- into developing its automation software and growing its services organization.
EMC is eyeing a business model with about 30% of its revenue coming from software and approximately 20% from services in 2003. During the most recent quarter, software and services represented 25% and 11%, respectively, of EMC's total revenue, the company said.
The new products include ContolCenter Open Edition, Replication Manager, StorageScope, and Common Array Manger. All four software products are controlled by a middleware application called WideSky. WideSky is able to manage storage hardware and software from both EMC and its competitors.
"What EMC is trying to do is to make EMC ContolCenter the console from which the entire storage universe will be managed," said Arun Taneja, senior
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The difference from yesterday, said Taneja, is that ECC, which always managed the EMC world only, will now manage competitor's hardware and software products.
Taneja said the software under the AutoIS blanket will appeal to EMC's enterprise customers.
EMC's new software products can manage hardware from competitors like IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. And EMC said users running big environments with multiple boxes, including EMC's hardware, can now use EMC's management products to handle all of their storage, regardless of manufacturer.
But the drawback to managing multi-vendor storage under AutoIS is that while it can manage competitor's hardware, it doesn't manage it as well as the software originally designed for it. For example, EMC won't manage Shark better than IBM. Upshot: The products under AutoIS can simplify enterprise storage environments by managing all the hardware, but some features get lost in the translation.
But try as they may, there is no guarantee that EMC's quest to rise to the top of the storage management heap will end in victory.
"Whether [AutoIS] is sufficient for EMC to maintain a stranglehold is not clear to me yet, Taneja said. He said that the key to EMC's future may be as a solutions player that supports more than its own technologies. "Nevertheless, I think it still puts them on a direct collision path with Veritas," he said.
From a distance, he said, EMC is taking steps in the right direction. "But panacea for the IT administrator they are not. At least until we see meat on the bones of these concepts," said Taneja.
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