EMC is developing four new storage products, including a system for small and midsize companies.CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—While offering few details, EMC Chairman Joe Tucci announced four new products at the companys Innovation Day conference, held at the Museum of Science here on Nov. 14.
Tucci said the company would introduce a product for small and midsize businesses, two Web 2.0 products, and another product, which he coyly refused to describe. The company, he said, is working to make it possible for its customers to handle huge growth in storage demands at an affordable cost.
The first of the four products that Tucci announced is MAMBA, a storage solution aimed at small and medium enterprises and for departmental use, he said. Tucci said EMC plans to focus more than it has on SMBs as well as on finding ways to use storage tiers to minimize the cost per byte of enterprise storage.
The two Web 2.0 products are HULK, which Tucci said is the hardware component of the solution, and MAUI, EMCs companion software. The names of all three products are acronyms, he said, but he declined to spell out what they stand for.
The fourth product that Tucci said EMC would be announcing in the near future is called HomeStore. Tucci refused to explain what it was beyond saying, "You can figure it out from the name." Details about the four products, such as projected release dates, were not provided.
Click here to read about EMCs plans to offer an on-demand storage service.
Tucci said EMC is working to take tape storage out of the equation for most enterprises. "In the next 10 years, all recoveries will be based on disk technology," he told the group of analysts and press at Innovation Day. "Speed and cost are of the essence; you have to have all of your data available."
EMC is also working to make it easier for users to demand data encryption, Tucci said. "Key management must be robustly secured," he said, adding that people requesting access to information should really be authorized to have it.
He continued, "Most information lives in archives. First you must have technology to create archives; you must make sure that this information is compliant and that its immutability is assured." He noted that part of compliance is e-discovery, which, he said, has become incredibly important.
Complicating the issue is that more and more information doesnt fit neatly into rows and columns, he said. "Ninety percent of information is unstructured or semi-structured; if you dont manage that information, you dont get value."
Health care is already becoming a major source of such unstructured data, Tucci said, and such information is growing rapidly, with some EMC customers already having over a petabyte of data managed by EMCs storage.
On another topic, Tucci said some of the companys acquisitions, notably VMware, are exceeding his expectations. He said VMwares technology has sold far better than projected, and has been largely responsible for fueling interest in virtualization.
"When we bought VMware there were articles that said VMware was a 1.2 billion dollar market," Tucci told eWEEKs Eric Lundquist in a separate interview. "We were criticized for that. Now people have come to the conclusion that this will be a double-digit billion dollar market," he said. "I cant think of a market that got that big that fast."
Read details here about EMCs acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems, a small online storage service company.
EMC Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Nick said part of the companys strategy is to encourage innovation, and the company is already doing advanced prototyping in areas such as compliance.
"There are different types of compliance," Nick said, pointing out that these areas share common characteristics, such as preserving data, classifying it, making sure it can be found again, making sure its only available to people who are authorized to see it, and "assuring retention policies are followed for retrieval and protection and are in compliance," he said.
Nick, speaking to eWEEK in a separate interview, said there is a strong need for a reference architecture to make sense of all of the various parts of the compliance equation. EMC is ready to come forward with such an architecture, but, "Its not a journey for the faint of heart," he said.
Nick said one of his biggest challenges, and EMCs biggest opportunities, is to stitch together all of the technology the company has gained through its acquisitions. "We are bringing together a framework that can be more holistically applied," he said, adding that another big challenge is to avoid silos of information and the resulting overlapping and redundant technologies.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.
Data Storage, Data Backup and Storage Virtualization 
/ 3 
