Storage Cannibals

LUNCHTIME -- Storage virtualization may be progressing, but the switch-based version is clearly a work in progress, thanks to the languid approach of big players.

Take the case of Incipient. This company is upgrading and claims to be doing fairly well among financial services companies. (See Incipient Sticks to Business.) While it still lacks some features, such as support for Brocade switches, the vendor's momentum seems solid, if small.

"I really feel that Incipient has innovated in the virtualization space with more intensity than just about anybody, and they have some extremely loyal and excited users as a result," writes analyst Brad O'Neill of the Taneja Group consultancy in a note to Byte and Switch. But as he sees it, small players won't really take off until they have partnerships with the large switch vendors.

"The challenge [Incipient] have faced, along with every other network-resident virtualization vendor, is that they are acting on a stage dominated by large strategic vendors who have little interest in letting disruptive third party technologies take over control of their intelligent switching platforms," O'Neill maintains. "The smaller players like Incipient can create thought leadership, but they need the IBMs, Ciscos, EMCs and Brocades of the world to embrace that vision in order to achieve pervasive market impact."

A big culprit here is EMC, whose Invista is largely invisible in publicized deployments.EMC claims to have more than 150 Invista installations, some in the lab, some in production. But an analyst outside the Taneja Group, who asked not to be named, says trials amount to fewer than a couple of dozen, none of which are in production. The analyst says EMC is likely to re-release the product this fall to correct existing weaknesses.

Whatever the case, EMC won't be rushed. "Many customers spend months working these evaluations. These customers are some of the largest companies in the world and are very recognizable names," writes EMC spokesman Todd Cadley in an email. Further, he says EMC already has products to solve some of the main reasons customers turn to storage virtualization -- storage provisioning, heterogeneous cloning, and data migration. Why reinvent the wheel?

Case in point: EMC's heterogeneous, continuous, remote replication package -- RecoverPoint -- is already shipping, obviating the need to imbue Invista with its own functionality. In October 2006, EMC announced that RecoverPoint was integrated with Invista, says Cadley.

EMC's quandary is clear: Switch-based virtualization could erode sales of other products. It's not a stretch to imagine Cisco, Brocade, IBM, and other big wheels thinking the same.

Hardly an atmosphere conducive to rapid growth. Indeed, the surprise would be if independent vendors like Incipient survive without being gobbled by their larger benefactors. We'll check in periodically with Cisco about that.Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch