EMC's Lewis On Storage Virtualization

The EMC/IBM rivalry for top mind share in the storage industry is spilling out into storage virtualization. In this market, each aims to convince customers that it offers the best means of turning multivendor storage hardware into heterogeneous storage pools managed in a unified way. IBM last week touted Cisco, a big EMC storage user, as its 1,000th storage virtualization customer. Big Blue also described EMC's upcoming Storage Router as a proprietary. Now Mark Lewis, executive vice president of EMC, gives that vendor's side of the story.

CRN: What is EMC's virtualization strategy?

LEWIS: It's to create an architecture that gives customers flexibility to implement virtualization as a transparent process, in addition to their existing infrastructure. All of the products that are out there are simply putting a proprietary array controller in front of the existing array systems, and saying they're open because they cannibalize and de-function all of the systems that function behind that virtualization.

To me, the idea of open is what VMware does, which is running an application in a VMware environment. You don't need to recompile it, and you don't hurt the application.

Our Storage Router design is based on the ability to go into an Hitachi environment and allow Hitachi replication, or go into an IBM environment and allow IBM's replication software to be used. So we can allow the use of any replication that exists in the environment today. We're completely transparent in that we present a SCSI protocol layer and Fibre Channel volumes, the same representation, and the same mode representation, as you would whether you took in or out virtualization.

CRN: IBM said that if EMC allowed true virtualization, open virtualization, then EMC would lose its lock on its hardware.

LEWIS: We don't have a lock on the hardware today. People buy our platforms because its simply a better product. We've proven that time and time again. Several years back, when Hitachi came out with a new product, and we needed to do some re-innovation, they were able to take some market share. We had no lock on the market. EMC has since taken that market back.

Everything we'll do with Storage Router is to provide additional value in the environment. Imagine if you're a customer. You're going to be able to deploy Storage Router in an EMC or an IBM or a Hitachi environment and get a new capability without destroying any of the value that has already been purchased. So you can go into a Hitachi environment and get virtualization and keep your XP Copy or XRC. You can go into an IBM environment and do the same thing.

CRN: Is there a channel play for Storage Router?

LEWIS: Absolutely yes. I saw IBM comments that we're not introducing it to the channel. That's correct, because we are going to do a phased deployment. That is, we don't want to be 3-1/2 years into this market with nothing to show for it.

So one of the things we're looking to do is have a lot of high direct touch with customers to push this to our largest customers first, and make sure we've got the quality, the documentation, the training, and all that really put together so that next year, as we introduce this to the channel, it's something that the channel can pick up and run with. What we want is a product that is ready for the channel. When it gets into the channel, it's something they can rapidly make money on. We'll start the channel the early part of next year.