| QUESTION & ANSWER |
Duplessie asks, EMC answers |
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By Mark Lewis, Site Editor
12 Mar 2002 | SearchStorage |
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EMC's WideSky initiative is drawing fire from the rest of the storage industry who looks at EMC as a maverick dissenter thumbing its nose at standards bodies.
But, not so says EMC's VP of Global Alliances Donald Swatik. Swatik says EMC is not only cooperating with standards bodies like the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), but is playing a major role in shaping the technologies that come from these organizations.
Industry analyst and founder of the Enterprise Storage Group (ESG), Steve Duplessie sat down with Swatik and asked him about WideSky and how EMC fits in to the storage puzzle.
Below is a transcript of their recent interview. If you'd rather watch this interview and have RealPlayer or Windows media player, click here for the 9 minute Webcast.
Don, there seems to be a lot of different standards initiatives in the storage industry, why do you think that is right now?
Swatik: I think the one word answer is networking. If you look at what is going in the storage industry today, we are going though essentially a revolution from direct-attached storage to network information storage systems.
As we network information, what's happening is the networks are not homogeneous networks, networks are heterogeneous in respect to the servers, networking elements and storage.
And we are now at a point where we need to have more standards to manage this heterogeneous networked environment.
What role does EMC play in standards body, like the SNIA, for example?
Swatik: SNIA is a very good example. An EMC executive was actually the chairman of SNIA for the past 2 years, and is now serving on the board of SNIA.
More important, there is a working group (DRM) responsible for developing one of the most important new standards to come out, which is CIM -- the common information model.
We actually co-chaired that working group with HP. So we co-chaired that group and are having a very significant technical input in to the definition of that standard. In addition to that, other bodies, like within the IATF, we chair the group that is developing the standards for iSCSI.
Where ever you look in the industry you'll see EMC executives and technicians actively participating and promoting the generation of standards.
There is talk in the industry that because of CIM, that obviates the need for a middleware, the glue that ties it all together. Explain how CIM and WideSky integrate and interrelate, why do I need them both?
Swatik: If you take the framework of Widesky, what does Widesky do? You can look at Widesky as the universal translator. Different storage products speak different languages, different networking elements speak different languages, different host-based resources speak different languages. What WideSky is doing is translating all of those different languages into one common one that can allow the environment to be managed as one homogenous whole.
If we look at CIM or another industry standard, what we are achieving with the common information model is reducing the number of languages that need to be translated. So as more and more companies adopt the CIM standard, what we will find is the list of languages that need to be translated will be reduced. That is nothing but goodness, because that says, one, the translator has an easier job, but it doesn't eliminate the job of the translator, because there is still a large legacy installed base of products that are pre-CIM.
There are going to be issues going forward where every vendor will not interpret and adopt the CIM in exactly the same way. So you can say there will be CIM dialects when its all said and done, and those are going to have to be interpreted. From a long term point of view there is absolutely going to be a need for a layer of middleware that will provide this translation, the important thing about pushing the standards, is that the more standards we have, the faster we can move up the food chain and provide this total open software solution for the customer. Our customers don't care if we do it with middleware, or standards, what they care about is if they have an easily managed ubiquitous information infrastructure. That is the market requirement. How we do it is for us to decide, and the fastest way to achieving that goal is going to be with very, very robust middleware working in concert with industry standards.
| | | | "...what you are going to see is WideSky be integrated as part of those broader frameworks because the level of detail, the functionality that is going to come out of a WideSky like initiative will provide more functionality then more of these higher level frameworks will do." --Don Swatik | | | |
WideSky is EMC's initiative to aggregate and correlate all of these disparate management elements for disparate devices. There are other ways that users today manage heterogeneous storage environments in terms of using Openview, CA, BMC Control. They have their own initiatives. Is that a fair assessment?
Swatik: You are right that there multiple initiatives, the comment I'd make to you here is that we work very closely with all of those frameworks, whether it be Openview, Unicenter, Tivoli. I believe what you are going to see is Widesky be integrated as part of those broader frameworks because the level of detail. The functionality that is going to come out of a WideSky like initiative will provide more functionality then more of these higher level frameworks will do.
So, EMC's bet, if I am understanding you correctly, in terms of the WideSky initiative, is that because you feel you have better ingrained understanding of the storage specific requirements, that WideSky will be that middleware glue element in that specific area even though it may ultimately roll up to a BMC, to a CA to a Tivoli?
Swatik: Absolutely. We actually see this as complimentary. We see major ISVs that are in the industry today that have a great amount of interest in interfacing with WideSky because we can bring incremental value to their solutions.
Don, some of the push back that we hear as observers of the industry, are things along the lines that there is a fear, right or wrong, that if I am XYZ corporation, that is a developer of products in this set -- and I join the WideSky initiative, as I roll out new function for my products for my customers, that EMC in some way will be able to limit the availability of that function to the ultimate end user customer, what do you say to that?
Swatik: Well that answer is very, very simple. With WideSky we are defining the interface that any partner, and that's whether that is a pure partner, or a competitor of ours, because the space that we are talking about here is the entire range of companies in the storage industry. The functionality that will show through, is going to be determined by the functionality that the individual company brings forward themselves. We are providing the interface; we are not defining their functionality or limiting their functionality.
I'd comment here that one of the very strong market requirements that come through from the customer face and the reason why we are seeing these heterogeneous environments is, not only the price of storage, the networking and the host-based resources, is the customers want to be able to have uniqueness that comes from having a heterogeneous environment. So an environment that would mask the uniqueness, kind of goes away from the whole idea of having heterogeneous in the first place. So that is an absolute requirement for this solution.
| | | | "...the quicker the industry adopts standards, the easier its going to be to provide translation and the more time and energy can be spent on providing more and more functionality to our customers." -- Don Swatik | | | |
Would it be fair to say that, where companies haven't rolled out a CIM standard interface, that WideSky still has the ability to extract from the consumer or from that application layer, from that management layer, the ability to extract the various interfaces(be they command line, be they telnet). So in other words, WideSky, weather or not someone joins this program, WideSky will have the ability to manage those assets?
Swatik: Absolutely. The simple answer to that is WideSky can perform and provide to our customer 100% of what they are looking for in respect to open storage management. Having more people cooperating and more people work on the program will collectively accelerate the rate where we can get to 100%.
And CIM, if I am understanding it correctly, is just another accelerant? It just corrals more cats, if you will, it just puts a more common face so there are less translation elements that you have to go through.
Swatik: Exactly. That is why we are very enthusiastic about CIM, and that is why we are putting a large amount of EMC resource in to it. Because the quicker the industry adopts standards, the easier its going to be to provide translation and the more time and energy can be spent on providing more and more functionality to our customers. It just keeps on coming back to customers asking for more and more capabilities with respect to management of very, very complicated heterogeneous environment. And our goal is to provide the most robust solution to our customers as quickly as we can. Whether it be cooperation of APIs or the development and implementation of standards -- all of these are synergistic toward one common goal of giving our customers exactly what they're asking for.
For more information on EMC's WideSky and AutoIS initiatives:
View the complete Webcast
Analysis: Can EMC solve the storage management dilemma?
Vendors denounce EMC's WideSky as defacto standard
Open management standard still simmering
Make your own thoughts on WideSky known,
sound off in our forums.
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