Biggest News at EMC World Didn’t Happen

LAS VEGAS — There was a modicum of news May 19 on Day 1 of EMC World here at Mandalay Bay resort: some standard new-products, an OEM announcement and a denial that one of the host company’s divisions was going to be spun off.

That’s right, VMware will remain under the ownership of EMC. So let’s put that rumor out to pasture. (See today’s eWEEK.com for all these articles.)

But the biggest news of all never happened. And it still might not take place for another year.

EMC, No. 1 in the world in selling storage disks and software, is working on a major new global data repository internally called “Maui.” The hardware on which it will eventually run is called “Hulk.”

Together these two new technologies could remake the face of the storage industry, they’re that big and important.

Sigh. No announcement at the company’s biggest event of the year. Still being built in the Hopkinton, Mass., hangar. R&D still in progress, we guess.

“This stuff is really hard to put together,” Robin Harris, an independent storage analyst and author of the StorageMojo blog, told eWEEK. “They were talking about this six months ago, but lately they’ve been quiet.”

They had to have run into some development problems. Not that unusual, to be sure.

“You can’t just put together multiple petabytes [of storage in locations around the world] without getting plenty of help to manage it,” Harris said. “This is a totally new-level storage product they’re working on. IBM doesn’t have this; HP doesn’t have this; Sun doesn’t have this.”

It handles all the data synchronization and security with aplomb, Harris said. It’s designed for no one point of failure; theoretically, no single natural disaster can beat this system, Harris said.

“Because it’s commodity-hardware based, it becomes the obvious place for archives,” he said. “E-discovery applications can layer on top of it … it’s a very impressive project.”

More on this to come. Stay tuned.