IBM Corp. is claiming a storage management victory over EMC Corp., saying it can now control its leading competitor"s entire line of storage arrays with the latest version its SAN Volume Controller appliance.
IBM said its virtualization device, SAN Volume Controller Version 1.2.1, can now manage EMC"s midrange arrays, the Clariion CX300, CX500 and CX700. Midrange systems are the fastest-growing segment of the storage market, according to research firm IDC.
"With this announcement, we have made IBM"s SAN Volume Controller the killer application in the storage industry and the leading virtualization solution, whether measured by performance, scalability or device interoperability," Jens Tiedemann, general manager of IBM TotalStorage Open Software, said in a statement.
In May, IBM announced that it could provision storage from EMC"s high-end Symmetrix array and its Clariion CX200, CX400 and CX600 arrays. Two weeks ago, IBM said it had added EMC"s newest high-end Symmetrix array, the DMX. IBM announced in May that its virtualization appliance could manage Hewlett-Packard Co."s and Hitachi Data Systems Corp."s line of storage arrays.
Virtualization is the ability to create a layer of abstraction between application servers and the storage that supports them, allowing capacity from multiple storage boxes to be served up as if from a single pool. The technology reduces management interfaces and allows a storage administrator to control a larger portion of a company"s storage resources.
"(It) makes perfect sense for IBM to support Clariion, the industry"s leading midtier networked storage system," an EMC spokesman said today in response to the IBM announcement.
Mike O"Neil, vice president of enterprise systems at First National Bank of Omaha, has been using IBM"s SAN Volume Controller virtualization device since June to manage both his IBM high-end Enterprise Storage Servers and his HDS midrange Thunder arrays.
O"Neil, who is in the middle of consolidating storage for 590 application servers onto a 40TB storage-area network (SAN), said he likes the idea that he can now also put his EMC Symmetrix arrays behind the same management interface. "It is a significant announcement for us," he said, adding that he can reduce the amount of staff it takes to manage his storage environment with fewer management points.
O"Neil said he"s three quarters of the way through the effort to build a fully virtualized environment. "SAN Volume Controller has the full breadth of functionality, as far as what we"ve experienced," he said.
EMC has acquired 16 companies since 2000, and it spent more than US$3.5 billion on three acquisitions in 2003. But it has yet to respond to both HDS and IBM with its own virtualization technology.
EMC said at Storage Networking World in October that its virtualization product, called Storage Router, will be available in the first half of 2005. The technology is a combination of so-called intelligent switches and directors from Cisco Systems Inc., Brocade Communications Inc. and McData Corp. and EMC"s own firmware.
Kaushik Roy, a storage analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group Inc., said in a research note yesterday that EMC is tracking well for the fourth quarter, "suggesting that the perceived threat from competitors IBM and Hitachi Data Systems was overblown."
Earlier this month, IDC reported that revenue in the third quarter from EMC"s Clariion midrange line of storage grew 56 percent over the same period last year.
IDC also reported that EMC led the external disk storage systems market, with a 21.2 percent revenue share, driven by 17.4 percent year-over-year revenue growth for the quarter. HP, with a revenue decline of 7.5 percent year over year, came in second, with a 19 percent revenue share, followed by IBM with a 13.1 percent share. Network Appliance Inc. posted the strongest year-over-year revenue growth among the top vendors during the third quarter of 2004, with 24.6 percent growth.