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EMC Corp. on Thursday announced details of its Common Information Model and Bluefin roadmaps, and said its opening its WideSky storage management middleware to developers.
CIM is an evolving industry standard for making storage products all speak the same language to each other; Bluefin is an implementation specification. WideSky is EMCs proprietary translator between its products and third-party products, which are then managed through EMCs ControlCenter application.
EMC will begin rolling out CIM-enabled versions of its hardware and software, across many of its product lines, in mid-2003, said spokesman Mike OMalley, in Hopkinton, Mass.
Critics warn that even if CIM succeeds, it still only manages Fibre Channel storage, not the numerous other storage technologies. Also, its evolution is being slowed by the politics within the Storage Networking Industry Association, they said. That means WideSky will still be needed, EMC executives have said.
“People who dont know anything about CIM/Bluefin will be able to write their products to WideSky and have their products be CIM/Bluefin-enabled,” OMalley said.
Developers in EMCs various partner programs can now use WideSkys application programming interfaces for managing EMC storage, networks and resources, although WideSky still only partially supports Hewlett-Packard Co. and Hitachi Ltd. gear. Specifically, it doesnt support drive cloning or snapshots for HP, and because EMC only has access to HPs version of the Hitachi APIs, it doesnt support cloning, snapshots or back-end mapping of logical-to-physical resources for Hitachi, officials said.
The APIs do support Microsoft Corp.s Exchange server and EMCs ControlCenter/Storage Scope, which can be used for chargeback functions, officials said. Also, developers can write to WideSky in Java or XML, versus only in C, officials said.