EMC Virtualization Plan Is on Schedule, Executive Says

Computerworld - Mark Lewis, chief development officer at EMC Corp., talked to Computerworld last week about the state of the company's Invista virtualization software, which has yet to ship in bulk. Lewis also addressed moves by rivals IBM and Cisco Systems Inc. to sell virtualization products for the entire data center, from servers to back-end storage.

Mark Lewis, chief development officer at EMC Corp.

There seem to be a lot of delays in getting the Invista virtualization technology out. What's the holdup? We're really where we wanted to be with it. We said it would be in very limited availability this year. We didn't expect material impact. We didn't want or expect any volume ramp. We said customers should put it in development environments and said it was for enterprise customers. It's undergoing evaluation.

So you're not experiencing hurdles in getting this out? We very much acknowledged this was a major technology advancement. It involved new switch intelligence and a new product from us. We have a lot of customers looking at it. A reasonable number have it in their development centers.

When can customers expect Invista to be generally available? It's going to depend on our customers' development cycles. General availability will just be when our customers put it into production.

Do you expect Invista to be ready for mainstream use by 2006 or 2007? I think the product will start deployments into production environments early next year. The difference is that we don't expect quantities to be significant or there to be a lot of major adoptions until the 2007 time frame. It's the typical ramp.

IBM and Cisco have both come out saying they're going to virtualize the data center. How is EMC going to take on that challenge? Obviously with VMware, [we] have core server virtualization technology. I think really the thing that sets us apart is we have the leading Intel-based virtualization technology today. We, with Invista, have taken the extra effort to do virtualization right in storage. We just acquired Rainfinity, which I believe for NAS virtualization and global name-space capability is a very highly functional set of tools. Last February, we acquired [network systems management software vendor] Smarts, which delivers many key pieces of cross-domain technology required to connect all of these virtual environments together. The other folks talk a good line, but we're doing the heavy lifting in storage.

When do you expect to have Rainfinity's technology integrated with your network-attached storage technology? The simple fact is ... there is no integration work necessary. Thenice thing also is it works across multiple platforms so we can provide for seamless virtualization across EMC, Network Appliance and even Windows-based file systems.

Did the decision to halt sales of your NetWin Windows-powered NAS arrays indicate a movement away from Windows? No. We wanted to partner with Microsoft and still do that in as many areas as possible. We looked at the NetWin opportunity as just that - a way to fill out our overall NAS product line. What we clearly found is that EMC is a technology company, and there may be areas of the market where we play and don't play.

What do you think will be the hot topic at Storage Networking World next week? I think it will be information security. I think you're going to see that market hit a fairly chaotic state right now.