Due to ship in the next quarter, Storage Router is software developed to run on smart SAN switches, and it represents EMC’s entry into the heterogeneous virtualization market that is typified by products such as IBM Corp’s SVC, or Hitachi Ltd’s Lightning TagmaStore.
But in contrast with those products, until now the Storage Router has been publicly promised to include functions suited only for data migration. There have been no plans for the software to support the more critical areas of data mirroring or snapshotting.
That has now changed. In a statement issued to ComputerWire this week, EMC said that over time, Storage Router will feature remote replication capabilities for disaster recovery in a heterogeneous environment.
Although the company has previously said that it would not rule such a development, it has consistently argued that replication functions are best hosted on disk arrays, and has been highly critical of third-party products such as the SVC that commoditize replication tools.
The technical arguments about replication being best hosted on arrays are backed at least in part by analysts. But EMC may have also have been influenced by commercial factors. Because of its high-end presence, the company dominates the market for array-based replication software, which represents a significant share of the company’s high margin software business.
Not only do virtualization tools compete with this array-based software, but their ability to allow data to be replicated between different brands of hardware releases customers from a strong degree of lock-in to disk array makers. Conventional array-based replication tools cannot replicate even between different types of array made by the same vendor, let alone heterogeneous arrays.
EMC stressed that it is not abandoning array-based replication, or its technical merits, and said that its plans will give customers a choice. Customers will be able to virtualize their storage while still continuing to leverage their investment in array-based replication technology such as [EMC] SRDF, or to rely entirely on Storage Router’s network-based replication capabilities.
