EMC has extended its technology licensing agreement with IBM by another two years until 2017, to provide IBM i customers with storage interoperability interfaces and technical support.
The new agreement will enable IBM i customers to deploy a combinations of EMC VMAX storage and IBM Power Systems technologies.
In addition, both the companies will provide IBM i customers with D910 interface, which was jointly developed with IBM allowing the customers to leverage EMC virtual provisioning and automated storage tiering technologies.
EMC and IBM have worked together to develop the new D910-099 device type, which is a native 512 byte block FBA (Fixed Block Architecture) interface.
D910-099 device type is supported by hosts running IBM i 6.1.1 and later, as well as EMC VMAX 20K and EMC VMAX 40K storage arrays running VMAX Enginuity software (v5876 and later).
The D910 native IBM i interface eliminates the need for specially formatted 520 byte per block disks in the external storage array, without requiring the use of the IBM VIOS layer.
In addition, the joint development provides both EMC and IBM customers with a supported mechanism to use EMC VMAX Virtual Provisioning and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST VP) technologies, while maintaining the benefits of a native IBM i device type and interface.
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It also enables IBM i customers to use high volume standard format Flash, Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA drives and to exploit the benefits of these drive types in native IBM i environments.
EMC Enterprise Storage Division vice president Peter C. Conway said: "This exclusive collaboration between EMC and IBM — with the development of technologies like D910 — unlocks the ability for our customers to leverage all of the advantages of EMC VMAX storage natively in IBM i environments — helping customers to preserve and extend their mission critical investments in IBM i."
