The two moves were outlined by EMC CEO Tucci at a conference held by the storage giant for analysts and journalists in Boston, Massachusetts yesterday. Few details of the products were given, but EMC said both will ship within the next seven month.
The company also said that early next year Intel will begin shipping a home storage device that is powered by EMC software (see separate story).
Although EMC dominates the overall market for NAS or file-level storage, it does not a have large share of the market for high-end NAS devices costing $100,000 or more.
Now the company says it is set to join Network Appliance, Hewlett-Packard and startups such as Isilon, Exanet and BlueArc in pitching very scalable clustered NAS devices powered by multiple controllers at that market sector.
The use of clustered NAS has recently been expanding from its traditional base of high performance computing at research establishments and universities into commercial applications.
EMC will be aiming at this new market, Tucci said. This [clustered storage] is hardware and software aimed at the Web 2.0 market, Tucci said. That’s an incremental market for us.
The storage will combine hardware being developed under the codename Hulk, with a clustered file system codenamed Maui, Tucci said.
When we get to the cloud [Web] 2.0 technology you’ll see us deploy cluster technology, but different to existing products, where you can just plop down a cluster file system. You can also just put Maui down, but it will be a lot more than just a cluster file system, Tucci said.
Until now EMC has said that it has seen no need to offer clustered NAS that can scale across multiple hardware controllers, and manage large numbers of files within a single namespace.
But the demand for massive file-level storage in a post Web 2.0 world has apparently changed EMC’s mind. At the conference Tucci displayed a presentation slide that predicted that while 70% of data will soon be created by individuals, 85% of data will be stored not by those individuals but by organizations, in data centers.
Arguing that the same model of data creation and storage will occur in big businesses, Tucci said: I believe in this slide. It also tells you why we’re going to get more interested in the consumer or the individual.
The new low-end product is code-named Mamba, and was described as second generation [Clariion] AX by EMC’s senior vice president of storage platform operations, Rich Napolitano.
The only other information that EMC gave about Mamba is that it has been designed exclusively for SMB customers, and will ship some time within the next seven months.
EMC also promised that next year all of its disk arrays will include an option to spin down or reduce the spin speed of disk drives in order to reduce energy consumption and heat generation.
Tucci said that in the next quarter EMC’s flagship Symmetrix disk array will gain a thin provisioning function. Thin provisioning is an advanced form disk virtualization that can hugely improve disk utilization rates.
EMC has been beaten to market with thin provisioning by its high-end rival Hitachi and Hitachi’s OEM resellers Hewlett-Packard and Sun, as well as by start-ups such as 3PARdata and DataCore Software. Tucci argued however that its implementation of TP will not disable other software features – something that he claimed has happened on other vendors’ products.
Our View
Even though it is coming to market so much later to market with clustered NAS than its NetApp, it is not too late to win itself a slice of the action. NetApp has not yet been talking up the sales of its GX-powered NAS clusters, and does not have the market tied up.
Last month EMC bought Berkeley Data Systems, the company that owns the Mozy online backup service. Given EMC’s promise to ship Hulk and Maui within the next seven months, it is very unlikely that it has productized Berkeley’s back-end technology.
