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