EMC Sets Out 2008 Roadmap

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- EMC gave a sneak preview of new products aimed at consumers, SMBs, and Web 2.0 companies at its Innovation Day event here this week and also revealed plans to roll out power-saving software across its disk arrays.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci used the event at Cambridge's Science Museum to explain that the vendor will join the growing number of vendors powering their disks up and down in an attempt to cut users' energy budgets.

"We will provide spin-down capability across all of our arrays," he said, adding that this will be available sometime within the next six months.

A number of vendors, including Copan, Fujitsu, NEC, and Nexsan, already tout a disk-based power-saving technology called MAID (massive array of idle disks), with HDS recently unveiling its own power-saving disk products.

Unlike offerings from the likes of Copan and Nexsan, which keep disks idle until they are needed, EMC appears to be taking a similar approach to HDS, which keeps disks spinning and powers them down when they are not needed.EMC's power-saving capabilities will be offered as a software upgrade for its disk array family, according to Mark Lewis, president of the vendor's content management and archiving business.

"It will tie in with [EMC]'s existing ILM offerings," he told Byte and Switch. "Customers can create a tier of storage, and one of the characteristics of that tier could be that the disk will spin down after a certain period of time."

Analysts and journalists at today's event were also bombarded with a number of exotic-sounding code names from Tucci, as EMC gave a sneak preview of a number of forthcoming products.

"Absolutely nothing can happen in a technology company without a code name," quipped the CEO, describing a set of offerings, earmarked for Internet firms, that are currently dubbed "Hulk" and "Maui."

"This is hardware and software aimed at Web 2.0 and 'cloud computing' companies," said Tucci, explaining that these will be targeted at firms that offer Internet-based utility computing services.Maui is rumored to be a clustered file system software that will compete with Isilon's OneFS or NetApp's OnTap GX, although EMC is still playing the technology close to its chest.

"Maui is well beyond a clustered file system, but will incorporate some of the things a clustered file system does," said Tucci, somewhat vaguely, during his keynote.

His co-worker Lewis was a little more forthcoming on the subject of the mysterious Maui software.

"It's much more of a global storage repository than a clustered file system," he told Byte and Switch. "The functionality embedded [in Maui], and the scale, meaning global scale, are orders of magnitude beyond what is available on the market."

Another future product discussed was 'Mamba', although EMC revealed scant details about the technology. "It's aimed at and will cater to SMBs," was all that Tucci would say, adding that Mamba's launch is imminent."Every product that we have talked about here is not far out," he said, explaining that Hulk, Maui, and Mamba will be launched within the next seven months.

An analyst attending today's event told Byte and Switch that an assault on the SMB space would represent a shrewd move by EMC. "They know the Fortune 1000, but the SMB and mid-market are somewhat Greenfield to them," said William Hurley, senior analyst at the Breakaway Information Group.

"They have gained some experience there thanks to their partnership with Dell," added Hurley, alluding to EMC's reseller deal with Dell. "But a big challenge will be motivating the channel that serves the SMB market to see EMC as a legitimate partner."

In addition to SMBs, EMC also revealed its plans to sell storage products into the consumer space today, demo'ing a product code-named "Homestore" for storing digital media.

In an attempt to tap into consumers' growing use of digital cameras, video, and music, EMC has teamed up with Intel to offer a 4-Tbyte consumer storage device. Built on Intel hardware, Homestore uses a version of EMC's Retrospect backup software and represents the vendor's fist foray into the consumer space."This is an opportunity for EMC to get ourselves in front of a whole new audience," said Jay Krone, director of storage platforms at EMC. "You will be able to purchase this in Q1 of next year for less than $2,000."

The topic of virtualization came up time and again during today's event, with CEO Tucci touching on his plans for virtualization subsidiary VMware, which recently raised $1.7 billion in one of the year's biggest IPOs.

There has already been speculation that EMC may sell off all or part of VMware to bring in even more money, although Tucci said that this is unlikely.

"I do not have any intention of selling off the rest of VMware," he said. "It's a tremendous asset."

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