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.
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.
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.
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 | ||
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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.
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