EMC to build virtualization storage router

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- EMC Corp. announced yesterday at its annual user conference here that it plans to begin by next quarter beta testing of an enterprise-class "storage router" that will be able to pool storage capacity and migrate data seemlessly between boxes without impacting business applications.
EMC CEO Joe Tucci said during an interview with Computerworld that he expects to spend 12% of revenue on research and development over the next year, much of that on integrating recently acquired content management applications with existing EMC products.
Tucci said that with storage spending expected to increase by a modest 3% to 4% during the next year -- and with storage capacity needs expected to grow by 60% -- increasing performance through server and storage virtualization technologies and automated processes will continue to bring down storage costs. Those costs have already plummeted by 30% in the past year.
Rick Villars, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said the planned router will move the functionality usually contained in an array controller into the network, allowing storage to be presented in a unified fashion to application servers.
Mark Lewis, EMC's executive vice president of open software, said EMC's storage router product should be available in the first half of 2005. Lewis, who said the router is targeted at users with petabytes of storage needs, said the storage router software could reside on switches from any of the leading vendors, including Brocade Communication Systems Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and McData Corp.
"I'm not worried about time to market on this one," Lewis said. "We've taken a lot more time than other companies that have tried to race a product to market."
Lewis told a crowd of about 3,500 people at the event that EMC has also already begun developing a common look and feel to all of its supported platforms, including applications acquired from Legato Systems Inc., content management company Documentum Inc. and VMware.
"The basic user interface should be the same," he said of the multiyear integration project, dubbed Common Architecture, Modules and Services. "It's akin to Microsoft Office; you just know where the pull-down windows are," Lewis said.
Lewis also said EMC eventually plans to sell a single information life-cycle management (ILM) product that will handle the storage of data from creation to deletion on various types of storage, based on automated policies. That process will take years, however, he said.
"While I don't plan anytime soon to have a shrink-wrapped product ... that's the aspiration we have with ILM," Lewis said. In the