EMC moves into storage virtualisation

Malaysian Business, Jun 16, 2005 by S Jai Shankar

THE question has been floating around the industry for awhile now: When

will EMC Corp get around to launching a proper virtualisation product

when its competitors have had it for more than a year now? Moreover, EMC's

initial approach towards storage virtualisation - the WideSky initiative

- failed to hit bull's eye. The industry was indeed buzzing when EMC

finally announced the launch of its network storage virtualisation

platform called EMC Invista last month.

With the launch of Invista, which means `in sight' in Italian, the

storage virtualisation technology race is about to intensify. EMC took

time to explain why it took so long to launch a virtualisation product,

considering its dominant position in the storage solutions industry. `We

were not concerned about the so-called delay. It was more important to do

it right than to be the first in the market,' says Ken Steinhardt, EMC's

director of technology analysis. He was speaking during the Asia Pacific

launch of Invista in Singapore.

He says EMC didn't underestimate the complexity of the technology unlike

its competitions which launched their products earlier. `Because of the

over-confidence many of the promises made by other industry players over

last few years didn't pan out,' he says. Other products within the market

space include Hewlett-Packard's Enterprise Virtualisation Array, Hitachi

Data Systems' (HDS) virtualised TagmaStore system, and IBM's SAN Volume

Controller. Judging from the media briefing, it is clear EMC intends to

take things slowly.

This being the case, it is not even expecting the product to become a

money-spinner anytime soon. As it was during the development stage, the

company is again taking the safer route by opting to market the product

slowly. Initially it plans to concentrate on its first tier customers,

namely large MNCs and companies involved in the healthcare, financial

services, telecommunications as well as the government sector. Many of

these organisations usually run 24x7 operations, with minimal disruptions

especially when migrating data.

EMC has no specific sales targets for Invista at this point in time. Its

immediate concern is to educate customers on both the benefits of

virtualisation and the dangers of half cooked virtualisation strategies.

The product is priced at US$ 225,000 or approximately RM855,000 to

virtualise 64TB of storage. The price includes hardware and software. EMC

claims the package is about 30% less than what a customer would pay for `a

comparably configured' rival solution. But considering the various

variables often involved in making such calculations, such comparisons are

difficult to be attested.

Once the education level improves and the storage standards mature,

Invista solutions will be made available to smaller organisations via the

EMC Velocity channel partners. Steinhardt says the market is likely to

mature only in 2007 or 2008. It is likely that until then, contribution

from Invista to EMC's bottom line will not be significant. The company

does not reveal its revenue for Malaysia, but its total revenue from Asia

Pacific region for 2004 stood at US$ 926 million. The Asia Pacific region

currently contributes 11% of EMC's total revenue.

The company is planning its marketing effort to emphasise the fact that

storage virtualisation products need to solve business issues and not

create additional pain points. `EMC does not want to sell virtualisation

products for the sake of it without first finding out if there is a need

for such products in the first place,' Ken says.

EMC's contention is, many of its existing software solutions such as the

EMC ControlCenter family of storage resource management (SRM) and device

management software, EMC OpenReplicator, as well as EMC PowerPath already

address many of the business issues that virtualisation products from

other players are used for. `EMC's Invista will have to address specific

business issues that cannot be addressed by any other software solutions.

Only then the customer can experience adequate ROI,' he says.

EMC's trump card is probably its close collaboration with leading

network hardware players such as Cisco, Brocade and McData. The

collaboration has enabled EMC to place its virtualisation software in

`smart' switches. Interestingly, this approach which is termed the `out-

of-band' architecture is not common in the industry where many have

adopted the `in-bound' approach. The `in-bound' approach houses the

virtualisation software away from the switches, hence does not leverage on

the technology inherent in these switches.

According to Steinhardt, the reason EMC decided to opt for the `out-of-

band' approach is because it respects the technological innovations that

are being incorporated within switches and wish to leverage on it. EMC

contends that the out-of-band approach promises greater performance and is

also far more scalable compared to the alternative option. Invista will

support switches from Brocade and Cisco by the third quarter of 2005 while

McData switches will be supported early next year. It is possible that