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LAS VEGAS—Its been a busy week here for storage giant EMC Corp., what with announcements surrounding partnerships with Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. and the addition of new data movement capabilities in its software.
But all of the news followed a similar theme, and that is that networked storage will continue to grow, and as it does, enterprises are going to demand greater capability in monitoring, managing and moving it, EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci said in his brief keynote speech at the N+I conference on Wednesday.
“As you consolidate your informtion onto the network, you can use that as a base to easily consolidate your servers [and] consolidate your data centers,” Tucci said.
In addition, he said, “Youll see intelligence at every level [in an enteprise storage infrastructure]. Youll see storage intelligence in the network [and] storage intelligence in the servers.”
And with that growth and that intelligence will come the demand for centralized management, Tucci said. And Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, armed with its AutoIS suite of software, is prepared to give enterprises the management capabilities they need, he said.
At its annual Technology Summit, also in Las Vegas this week, EMC announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., in which the two companies will work together to bring new low-end storage hardware to the market and the integration of EMCs ControlCenter with Microsofts storage-related application programming interfaces aimed at snapshot software and multipath input/output.
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Also at its summit, EMC announced an agreement with Cisco, of San Jose, Calif., to develop network-resident storage management software for Cisco switches. At N+I on Wednesday, EMC unveiled upgraded data movement software, PowerPath 4.0, which now has a volume manager, plus future plans to include the movement of server software into network switches and storage management using the Common Information Model.
All of these moves are designed to enable IT administrators to gain greater control over and more flexibility of their storage infrastructures, said Erez Ofer, executive vice president of EMCs open software operations.
“Many people dont know how much storage they have today, and who is accessing it,” said Ofer, who took the stage after Tucci. Once they know this, planning and managing it becomes much easier, he said.
PowerPath 4.0—and future versions of the software—will make it easier for administrators to move data around their data center, which right now “is a very painful process,” Ofer said. The new software will enable enterprises to move data from their storage devices to servers, or from one storage array to another, without disruption.
EMCs recent moves are designed to keep up with trends in the storage industry, away from point products and more toward offering a comprehensive management suite, Ofer said.
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