At it annual analysts’ conference in New York yesterday the storage giant also outlined the smart-switch based software it will ship next year, promising huge throughput and in the process taking a major swipe at IBM’s competing SAN Volume Controller software.
The company said it believes that low-cost replication software could disrupt the backup software market, and help in its attack on Veritas Software Corp.
EMC also confirmed that it has no immediate plans to follow Veritas’ example by merging its VMWare server virtualization software with its storage software into a grand utility-style product.
In January EMC expected the overall storage market to grow by around 5% to 6% this year, and said its own revenue growth would more than double that at 25% – equivalent to almost 15% organic growth when allowing for the company’s recent purchases of Legato, Documentum, and VMWare.
But now it expects the storage market to grow by about 7%, outstripping overall IT growth of 3% to 4%, and taking its own growth to 30%, or about 19% organically. This would take the company’s revenue to around $8.1bn, in line with what some analysts had already expected. EMC’s guidance for the current quarter is unchanged.
Targets for growth include a significant opportunity selling replication or disaster recovery software to mid-range customers, and SRM software, which EMC said has yet to realize its market potential. Services and overseas markets will also be targets, as will EMC’s weak share of the enterprise backup and recovery market.
Legato chief Dave Wright said: To attack Veritas in backup as it exists today is not our Plan A…The backup market is going to change dramatically. You’re going to see a lot of replication software come down in price.
When we talk about attacking Veritas we need a disruptive point. I fundamentally believe we’re very close to that disruptive point, he said.
The deal with tape library-maker ADIC was rumored earlier this year (Computerwire March 5, 2004), and will see EMC resell ADIC’s libraries, and ADIC become yet another outlet for EMC’s Clariion low-end and mid-range disk arrays. It represents an admission by EMC that its ILM pitch is incomplete without tape in its product portfolio.
But EMC made it clear that it is still not much of a tape enthusiast. More and more disk-to-disk backup is replacing what was the purlieu of tape…clearly disk continues to push down, said Howard Elias, EMC executive vice president.
Joe Tucci, EMC CEO said EMC did not buy ADIC – as some had expected – because tape is not going to be a fast growing market, and EMC is focused on growth. It would be an oxymoron. I’d have a rebellion in my own head, and I couldn’t handle it, he said.
Hewlett Packard Co and IBM Corp issued statements crowing over what they said has been EMC’s history of dismissing tape, and its capitulation today. Underlining the connection between ILM and tape storage, Storage Technology Corp said: Thank you EMC….with this announcement, EMC recognizes that tape is an essential element to this [ILM] strategy, and sophisticated customers will consider StorageTek for their tape libraries.
EMC’s purchase of desktop and server virtualization specialist VMWare earlier this year appeared contradictory to its ILM and storage focus. It had previously said that it would not be following Veritas into the market for utility-style systems management software.
Yesterday VMWare CEO Diane Greene made clear that EMC still has no such plans, probably because it cannot afford to bring itself into competition with VMWare’s two very major customers, Hewlett Packard Co and IBM Corp. If we became proprietary to EMC’s storage plans, we’d lose a lot of our value.
But Greene said that EMC like other suppliers will use the VMWare SDK to link its ControlCenter storage software to VMWare’s virtualization tools. You wouldn’t believe how excited customers are about our connection to EMC. They realize that EMC understands server issues.
Tucci said: The virtualized infrastructure gives us a lot more flexibility in where we can play. But beyond that, I’m not making any comments.
Because VMWare needs to be kept neutral, it has been excluded from a new software group established at EMC. This group combines EMC’s software business with those of Legato and Documentum, and will co-led by EMC executive vice presidents Mark Lewis, and David DeWalt, who was formerly CEO of Documentum. EMC expects this group to see license and services revenues of about $1.5bn this year.
The smart-switch based software that EMC first announced in 2003 and talked up again in April this year will be called the EMC Storage Router. It will start beta test in the next quarter, and ship in the first half of 2005. EMC said it will run on a range of smart switches from major suppliers, including those from Brocade, Cisco and McData, but did not say which will be first.
Describing the device as a layer 3 router, Lewis said it will allow dynamic migration of data from disk array to disk array, without needing to shut down applications. During the conference EMC said that customers had said one of their most pressing needs is for systems that allow this non-disruptive maintenance or reconfiguration of storage systems.
As such, the software will not compete with the array-based mirroring and snapshotting software that accounted for around half of EMC’s new software license revenue last year. Lewis repeated EMC’s arguments that this software belongs on arrays, not smart switches.
Other software such as IBM’s SAN Volume controller do mirror and snapshot data from platforms other than array. Our Router will not hold any state data. SVC does, and so does HP’s CASA. That’s holding data in cache. What happens if an array fails? Or how do you do synchronous mirroring?, he said.
Lewis claimed a whopping throughput of 1.9m IOPS for the forthcoming Router. Such claims carry the caveat that actual performance will vary according to application, but EMC’s figure dwarfs those claimed for other products. IBM for example claims 280,000 IOPS for a dual-node SVC. The SVC does not exploit the scalability promised by the port-level processing of smart switches, but IBM insists it has a radical and patented caching system.
Mark my words. The SVC will not be successful. IBM will have to redesign it, Lewis said.
