EMC Targets NT Storage

ENT, March 4, 1998 by Michele Rosen

EMC Corp. has already garnered a large piece of the multibillion dollar open systems storage pie by developing its offerings for UNIX servers. Now, the Hopkinton, Mass.-based company is stepping up its efforts to add to its share by targeting companies looking to integrate data from NT servers into their storage systems. The company recently announced it will add Windows NT to the list of platforms supported by a number of its software and hardware offerings.

EMC announced that Windows NT servers can now connect to its Symmetrix storage systems through Fibre Channel. EMC added Fibre Channel support to the Symmetrix line in December.

The company also announced EMC Power-Path, a load balancing and path failover software package. Power-Path distributes data traffic across 32 data paths on a fully configured Symmetrix system. The software currently supports Sun Solaris servers; support for IBM AIX will be added in April, land support for HP-UX and Windows NT will be available during the second quarter.

In order to improve the availability of shared SCSI connections on its Symmetrix systems that are connected to NT servers, EMC also announced support for Microsoft Cluster Server. This support enables NT cluster servers to maintain a separate connection to the storage system.

Finally, EMC added Windows NT support for its Symmetrix Manager for Open Systems software, which enables Windows NT- and UNIX-attached Symmetrix systems to be monitored and controlled from a central management system.

At a February briefing in New York, EMC president and CEO Michael Ruettgers said the company sold $1.5 billion in open storage systems in 1997, exceeding its revenue from mainframe storage sales. The performance gave EMC a 27 percent share of the enterprise storage market, he said, adding that IBM's share had dropped from 38 percent in 1995 to 22 percent last year. EMC has supported both UNIX and Windows NT data in some capacity since 1995.

EMC representatives say they expect to be successful in the open storage market for two reasons. First, IT managers are consolidating their storage systems in the data center, regardless of the number of platforms in use. "We believe less and less of information people use at work will be considered personal, and more and more will be considered shared," says Bob Dutkowsky, EMC's vice president of markets and channels. Second, Dutkowsky says that EMC's software offerings help differentiate its products from the competition.

The competition, namely, Sun Microsystems Inc., Hitachi Data Systems (HDS, Santa Clara, Calif.), MTI Technology Corp. (Anaheim, Calif.), Compaq Computer Corp. and Digital Equipment Corp., all recently made announcements that could affect the open systems storage market during the next year. In January, Sun announced a new line of storage systems, called StorEdge, that will support Solaris, HP-UX and Windows NT by later this year. In its announcement, Sun said it "intends to double the size of its storage business by 2001 -- at the expense of IBM, Compaq and EMC." Hitachi and MTI announced a partnership that will enable the two companies to compete with broader offerings from companies like EMC. For example, MTI said it plans to integrate HDS technologies into its Gladiator product line, enabling support for UNIX, Windows NT and IBM System/390 data on the same storage system.

But according to one analyst, the announcement that Compaq will buy Digital will probably have the largest impact on the NT portion of the open systems storage market. "The majority of NT server buyers are going to buy [storage] from an NT server vendor," says Sean Derrington, senior research analyst for the Meta Group (Stamford, Conn.). Compaq already has 40 percent of the NT server market, and now it can offer Digital's Storage Works systems to those customers. "It is a well-priced offering that does compete with EMC in some cases," Derrington says.