By William Fellows

EMC Corp says it will continue with its storage strategy despite the fact that Hewlett-Packard Co has switched sides and is selling Hitachi Data Systems Ltd storage, while IBM Corp has decided to produce its own storage again, beginning with Shark. EMC management, including VP product management Don Swatik – creator of StorageTek’s Iceberg array OEMed by IBM – told Merrill Lynch & Co that EMC should be able to better leverage internet storage opportunities and will begin a new marketing campaign aimed at this market next quarter. Dot com companies account for 10% of its revenue now, expected to rise to 25% in a few years.

It notes that much of the criticism from its competitors misses the point. Merrill Lynch sums it us as Fibre Channel won’t solve competitors’ inability to connect their subsystems to any server. FC allows for faster transfer rates over greater distances but does not address interoperability. The brokerage also believes that EMC is as open as any storage product, at the server, switch and subsystem level. However EMC software can only manage EMC storage. Its plans it to change this exclusivity via new interface initiatives including the activity of its FibreAlliance. However, that grouping in itself is regarded as proprietary by competitors. Nevertheless it notes that the industry-wide Storage Area Networks Industry Association (SNIA) made just two changes to the FibreAlliance plan which has now been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). All well and good, but in addition to Sun’s Jiro (nee StoreX) APIs there still remains a confusing number of groups and interests competing for control of the storage interface.

EMC’s 10-year-old architecture has been updated as Mosaic 2000 and rewritten in C++, which HDS says makes it less reliable as it’s a relatively untested code base. EMC costs $0.40 to $1.40 per Mb based upon its full service approach to storage while IBM’s Shark costs from $0.50, more with storage.

Meantime, EMC says that our recent implication that storage is not rocket science is a disservice to companies making significant investment in the technology and that it alone is investing $400m this year. á