EMC will support the storage system itself. HDS or IBM will be responsible to the customer that all the elements of their virtualized implementation all work together, the company has told ComputerWire.
That promise eliminates what could have been a roadblock to sales of IBM’s SAN Volume Controller, or Hitachi’s Lightning TagmaStore virtualization system. EMC was the supplier most likely to throw up a support roadblock, because of its high-end rivalry with IBM and Hitachi.
The split between support of the array itself and the wider virtualization system is entirely appropriate, according to analyst Tony Asora at the Enterprise Storage Group.
Quite frankly it is beholden on the virtualization vendor to support the system, because the virtualization system is the intelligence that takes control of the arrays that are attached to it, Asora said.
EMC put it slightly differently. In line with its established and very public attitude towards virtualization technology, it said: IBM is introducing something entirely new and unproven into customers’ data paths. The onus therefore is on IBM for end-to-end support, data integrity, performance, interoperability testing, and other issues. The same applies to Hitachi, EMC confirmed.
Virtualization systems introduce a strong element of commercial politics because customers that attach arrays to virtualization system need no longer buy or use array-based replication software. Replication that was done on the arrays can now be completed by the virtualization system.
That threatens to reduce sales of array-based software, of which EMC has far more to lose than any other supplier. But EMC puts forward a range of technical arguments that virtualization systems compromise the integrity of storage systems and can limit performance. These arguments are at least partly backed by analysts.
EMC is itself developing a virtualization system, which is the smart switch-based Storage Router software that is due to ship next year. But Storage Router will not duplicate all of the replication functions of array-based software.
It will allow data to be moved between heterogeneous disk arrays, or tiers of storage, without disrupting applications. However unlike almost all other virtualization tools, it will not offer replication functions suitable for data protection – because of course EMC argues that these are best completed on the array.
