Confident that IT administrators have grown comfortable with the concept of Web-based software and pay-as-you-go grid computing, EMC Corp. officials have introduced subscription storage.
Just two weeks after the launch of their AutoAdvice tech support and SAN Architect design services, EMC is preparing for metered storage billing with its new OpenScale service, officials said last week.
OpenScale itself has existed since 1999 as “a series of financing options,” said spokesman Dave Farmer, in Hopkinton, Mass. “The newer aspect is the metering, automated billing functions. Well be saying more about it in the future,” Farmer said, declining to specify timing or other user benefits.
The new features are tailored for large customers, Farmer said. In addition, EMC will limit its services to software and administration. Becoming an actual storage service provider, a common evolution for vendors in the dot-com era, is not the plan, Farmer said.
OpenScale connects customer data centers to EMCs own with modules called Collectors, running through an existing support site.
“Collector [servers] can remotely collect information from many systems without agents installed on each system. … The data collection engine may remotely invoke some programs on a monitored system, but no full-time, 24-by-7 agents need to be installed or managed,” according to EMCs EMClink.net Web site.
Collector modules, built with technology from EMCs $50 million acquisition of Luminate Software Corp. in 2001, run on Windows servers and support EMCs high-end Symmetrix and midrange Clariion arrays, Celerra network-attached storage, and rival Network Appliance Inc.s hardware. Hewlett-Packard Co.s HP-UX, Linux, Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris, AIX and Windows operating systems are supported. There are also modules for Oracle Corp. and SAP AG applications.
The public documents can be found at www.emclink.net/downloads/collector/download.html.