EMC Corp. last week debuted hardware partnerships and upgraded software as part of the high-end storage hardware makers efforts to expand into data life-cycle management.
EMC, based in Hopkinton, Mass., entered the low end of the enterprise NAS (network-attached storage) market by licensing Microsoft Corp.s Windows SAK (Server Appliance Kit). The company will attach it to Clariion storage products. That fills a gap in the product line of EMC partners, such as Dell Computer Corp., that have generic drive arrays for SAK and EMCs high-end Celerra but nothing in the middle, officials said.
The new product family, NetWin, will be priced starting at $50,000 and will ship in September, said CEO and President Joe Tucci, in a conference with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
EMC also announced certification of Cisco Systems Inc.s MDS (Multilayer DataCenter Switch) 9000 family, due to ship this quarter. Having a new name brand to rival incumbents will likely result in reduced prices, officials said.
In software, EMC announced the licensing of Microsoft APIs, so its ControlCenter software can better manage NetWin and other EMC-Windows combinations.
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To distinguish it from the competition, EMCs volume manager has a central, redundant metadata store and automatically identifies logical unit numbers, said Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of storage infrastructure software at EMC.
An updated PowerPath 4.0 can now move data without downtime, Gahagan said. Future versions will be able to move data onto network-based switches and be managed by the Common Information Model, he said.
Later this month, EMC will also ship AutoAdvice and SAN Architect, officials said. AutoAdvice is a tool for comparing live storage environments with a knowledge base over a network. SAN Architect is a visual storage area network design tool.
Pricing for the new software was not available.
Howard Stuart, manager of radiology IS and picture archival communication systems for the Portsmouth-based Southern Ohio Medical Center, recently upgraded to EMCs high-end Symmetrix hardware devices, saving money by buying refurbished systems. “Were doing real well, and PowerPath is working well for us,” Stuart said.