CLARiiON Call

l What

is the single-most important factor that differentiates CLARiiON with ATA, from

your other line of products in terms of technology and functionality?



Online disks offer high service levels, but at a high cost wile offline tape

comes at a low cost, but has low services levels. What was needed was something

to bridge the gap–that is, online service levels at offline costs. ATA disk

technology has the potential to bridge that gap. Since ATA drives offer higher

capacity, lower RPM speed, and lower price points than Fiber Channel or SCSI

drives, they enable organizations to bring more information online, improving

service levels for more of their information and thus, generating more value

from the data. EMC has incorporated ATA drives into the CLARiiON CX series to

bring more information into online SAN and NAS environments, thereby improving

performance levels and reducing back-up time for enterprises.

l What about data security?



CLARiiON has no single point of failure. It has a full HA design, and uses RAID
to protect online data.

l Who are the vendors you have

signed partnerships with in India, and what will be your mode of distribution?



Locally, our focus is on selected value-add partnerships. Our partners

include Tata Elxsi, HCL, Wipro, Datacraft and Dell. We’re following a two-fold

approach–direct and through our channel partners.

l What do you propose to do in

the area of storage virtualization?



Virtualization is a vague term, and is probably one of the hardest words to

understand because it is descriptive of a technology, not a solution. While

virtualization is an important element, businesses must bear in mind that it is

only a piece of the overall storage management solution. It will exist to

provide background data movement, background data transfers, data mobility

across systems as organizations are doing upgrades and swap-outs that help

improve business continuity. EMC’s AutoIS strategy deploys Out-of-Band

technology that integrates and works with its virtualization capabilities at the

storage arrays, switches and network. EMC’s virtualization solutions in

Storage Resource Management allow mapping of the object relationships in the SAN

for Reporting, planning and control.

l Your India development

center was launched with a promise of contribution to your full line of storage

software products. What’s the progress on that front?



The EMC India Software Development and support center will initially perform

software maintenance and support activities for many of our open software

product offerings, and over time will contribute more to the development and

growth of our full line of storage software products.

As a part of your global strategy, you’re moving on from hardware to

software with about 75% of your R&D investment in storage software. What’s

the current percentage breakup? (Hardware, software, services).

EMC’s global revenue mix for FY’02 is hardware (54.8%), software (22.6%),

services (19.7%).

Neetu Katyal