Advertisment

EMC’s ILM Bet

author-image
DQI Bureau
New Update

Finally there is an agreement. EMC agrees, HP agrees and so do Veritas and
other storage vendors. A single bet is driving R&D, investments and
marketing efforts. And the bet is information lifecycle management. All the
storage vendors are falling over each other to demonstrate that they are ready
with a complete end-to-end solution. EMC has made inroads with 50 odd companies
in the US. And now it is targeting companies in the Asean region. In late
November, EMC in association with NCS, announced the first proof-of-concept
solution for ILM in Asia. This is seen as a significant development as NCS Pte
Ltd is a leading regional IT and communications engineering services provider in
Singapore, and is believed to be the single largest influencer on Singapore
Government’s IT initiatives.

Advertisment

EMC had, in early August, announced that its future lay in ILM and was
betting heavily on this. It has evolved a process, which it says is policy-based
alignment of storage infrastructure with data value and promises that ILM will
enable significant TCO savings.

EMC and NCS have demonstrated how ILM works in real-life environments in
terms of business continuity, rapid recovery, e-mail archiving, file
distribution across heterogeneous networks, automated storage management,
back-up to disks, and enterprise content management. More than 10 applications
were integrated in the demonstration. With this, NCS became the first SI in
Asean to architect, design, and implement the first live demo of ILM in the
region.

EMC is banking on this demo to pave the way for ILM implementation in Asia.

Advertisment

In fact, ILM for EMC has become the mantra following the acquisition of
Legato Systems and with the agreement to acquire Documentum. Commented Tony
Marzulli, vice-president, Open Software, EMC, said, "The synergies between
EMC and Legato’s products, distribution, people and culture have accelerated
the creation of the ultimate ILM company."

Graduating
to ILM*
Phase 1:
Automated Networked Storage

Integrated, managed storage network. This allows you the critical tools to
consolidate, control, and ensures continuity and compliance. It is
critical that organizations start building their network storage
infrastructure and move far away from investing any further into stovepipe
architecture like direct attached storage
Phase 2:
Optimizing Service Levels

Organizations need to tier their applications and storage; they need to
set the policies that will dictate the different levels of performance,
availability, functionality, and economics. That will move information to
the appropriate service-level tier, as requirements change
Phase 3:
Integrating ILM across the Enterprise
With the three steps, a company can get its TCO down by about 50% in three
years. If an enterprise has 750 TB of baseline storage and the TCO at the
current level is indexed at 100, in three steps, it can be reduced to
47-57.
*Information
Lifecycle Management

EMC has unveiled several new products in the third quarter. These include the
DMX systems, software, and related technologies, including the new Symmetrix
DMX3000, an entry-level Symmetrix DMX800 configuration, a new advanced
replication technology, native iSCSI connectivity and enhanced functionality for
mainframe. Also, extension of EMC CLARiiON’s to EMC Navisphere, EMC SnapView
and EMC SAN Copy software and strengthening of its open software portfolio with
new VisualSRM and VisualSAN software for small-and medium-sized organizations,
and the introduction of EMC OpenScale, automated ‘pay as you go’ billing for
storage infrastructure.

Advertisment

India Strategy

Given that software plays an important role in the ILM process, can India be
far away? EMC is to invest over $100 million in the subcontinent over a period
of five years. It has identified four areas–grow the automated network storage
market in

ILM Primer
So what is ILM? As everyone
knows, not all information is the same. It has different attributes,
different age, different importance, and different value. Over time, the
value of information will change. What’s most interesting though is that
not all information changes value at the same rate or even in the same
direction. As a result, each type or class of information needs to be
cared for in different ways. The users or consumers of a particular type
or class of information expect–and will accept–different response
times when they need to access the information.
It are those differences in what users
expect that dictate the "service levels" that must be applied to
care for the information. These service level requirements really describe
the performance required, the level of availability that’s necessary,
and the type of functionality that must be applied. And because these
capabilities are not free of cost, the question of "what service
level?" must be answered within the context of cost. This is
particularly true of organizations anywhere in the world that are focused
on cost and deriving the maximum value from their information.

India, create a strong partnership-based strategy, invest in the R&D
facility and launch all the storage solutions in India. Its software development
support center in Bangalore contributes to the development and growth of the
full line of EMC’s storage software products and solutions globally. It is its
only R&D center outside of Europe and North America. It will be working in
all phases of storage product development lifecycle, architecture and design,
product implementation, and maintenance.

Advertisment

So is there a rollout strategy in India for ILM? Manoj Chugh, president,
India and SAARC, EMC explained, "ILM is achievable today, in India and
around the world."

For EMC, which is a world leader in storage, and is uniquely positioned with
both hardware and software for storage solutions only, making ILM a reality is
in its interest. Given that all the other vendors are betting heavily on this
space, EMC is leveraging its various acquisitions to get the first mover
advantage. The NCS proof of concept is just the first one to showcase ILM and
EMC has mastered the technology behind it.

Ch. Srinivas Rao The author was hosted
by EMC

Advertisment