EMC Corp thinks Unix is going the way of the mainframe and that within five years it will be regarded as a legacy system. Windows NT is where the action will be, it thinks. Indeed the company’s been telling Merrill Lynch it thinks NT needs EMC’s architecture to succeed in the enterprise. Yesterday EMC began offering a new data manager option which enables data to be moved directly from an EMC Symmetrix disk subsystem to an EMC Data Manager tape backup system providing backup and restore facilities in the event of failure. It means backup data does not have to be moved from the NT server across a network. EDM Symmetrix Path for NT file systems and NT versions of Oracle 8, Notes, Microsoft SQL, SAP R/3 and MS Exchange and Mail costs from $150,000. Meantime EMC’s says it’s less worried about competition from the likes of IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc – it’s reportedly winning many storage accounts with Sun’s Starfire customers – than Hitachi Ltd, which has been wining mainframe deals away from it. It told Merrill Lynch it had considered making a large purchase in the services sector but decided it would be too hard to integrate.
