Incipient said that although it is seeking OEM deals, it never discusses any such negotiations publicly. IBM was unable to return ComputerWire’s calls by press time.
Why IBM would want to OEM technology that would compete with its own successful SAN Volume Controller product is not clear. Incipient has yet to ship its software, which will provide very similar heterogeneous replication and volume management functions as the SVC.
The Incipient software is being developed to run on the major suppliers’ platforms. These would include Cisco’s MDS 9000 SAN switch, Brocade’s FAP, and the smart switch that McData is developing.
Because it will use the port-level processing of smart SAN switches, the Incipient software like other smart SAN switch-based products promises to deliver greater throughput than IBM’s SVC appliance-based system.
But analysts agree that the caching architecture of the SVC has more than sufficient throughput for the huge majority of applications. If IBM were to launch an OEM’ed version of Incipient system intended for very high-end applications, it would undermine its arguments that the SVC suffers no scalability problems.
Incipient may have some unique functionality that IBM lacks. The startup stressed the value that its software it will deliver for data migration. Incipient however did not cite any outstanding functions that rival virtualization systems including the SVC do not also offer. OEMs will decide which functions they want to take, Incipient said, in what was only a general reference to such deals.
