EMC, IBM Swallow Their Pride

At long last, the stiff-necked standoff between EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) on storage management is over, as the two vendors have agreed to exchange programming interfaces to let each other's products interoperate (see EMC, IBM Extend Interoperability).

A deal between EMC and IBM to swap APIs was rumored to be in the works for quite some time (see EMC, IBM Are Talking Swap). The companies would not disclose how long they had been in negotiations.

So what finally turned the tide? Both vendors claim they came to the epiphany that customers would benefit if they worked together. "There's been kind of a cloud over the EMC/IBM relationship," says Chuck Hollis, VP of platforms marketing for EMC. [Ed. note: It was more like a brick wall between them.] "The customers we've previewed this to have more confidence about where we're headed."

But while the deal promises to help mutual customers of EMC and IBM, it's not clear when this arrangement will bear fruit. EMC says it will put out a revised roadmap in the first quarter of 2004 that indicates when its products will natively support IBM's.

As part of the agreement, EMC and IBM have agreed to exchange application programming interfaces (APIs) for their disk storage products, including interfaces that conform to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)'s Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S). Hollis says the APIs that EMC and IBM are exchanging "go beyond what SMI addresses today."The two companies have extended their existing cooperative support agreement to include a broader range of servers, storage, and software products, designed to help their joint customers resolve problems faster.

"I think customers will see an immediate benefit in working around support issues," says Roland Hagan, VP of storage marketing for IBM.

In addition, EMC has licensed interfaces for IBM's Enterprise Storage Server (ESS), also known as Shark; this is intended to let EMC support IBM's Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (PPRC), Extended Remote Copy (XRC), FlashCopy, Multiple Allegiance, and Parallel Access Volumes (PAV) features on EMC Symmetrix systems. Financial terms of this part of the deal were not disclosed.

The EMC/IBM agreement is the last one of its kind among the major storage industry vendors, EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) having each struck similar interoperability agreements with each other (see EMC and Hitachi Bury Hatchet, HP Makes API Triple Play, HP, Hitachi Trade APIs, EMC, HP Catch Each Other's Codes, HDS: EMC Scuttled API Swap, and Standards Clique Freezes Out EMC).

One sticking point between IBM and EMC was -- undoubtedly -- EMC's unwillingness to pull back on WideSky, its proprietary middleware that was supposed to provide interoperability among multivendor storage networks.IBM had been unusually outspoken against EMC's WideSky strategy, seeing it as a bid by EMC to control the storage management stack (see IBM Leaks Storage Tank Details). Recently, EMC executives have said they are dropping WideSky in favor of SNIA's SMI-S (see EMC Puts WideSky on Ice).

Hollis notes that the agreement doesn't mean EMC and IBM are best buddies now.

"We'll continue to compete vigorously in the market," he says. "The nice thing, from my perspective, is that now the products can compete on their merits instead of various other externalities."

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch