Special Report: EMC World 2006, Boston
Special Report: EMC World 2006, Boston
April 25th, 2006: A record attendance at EMC World 2006, Boston, as the company hits out at competitors, announces SAN consolidation, VMware, Smarts-based application discovery, automated fault management, and info-centric security.
Sitting in my room at the Boston Sheraton hotel following Day 1 of EMC World, CNN is talking about border protection in terms of erecting walls along perimeters in order to keep the illegals out. This would make EMC’s VP of Information Security, Dennis Hoffman, scoff. The reason? EMC’s take on information security, according to Hoffman, is that, “We consider that the bad guys are already inside.” Therefore, the company’s stance is that securing your data means exactly that – make the data secure via authentication and ID management.
Information/data security is not the only surprise that EMC has for image, data and records management professionals. This morning’s keynote addresses by CEO and chairman, Joe Tucci, Executive VP of Storage Platforms, Dave Donatelli, and President of EMC Software, Dave DeWaltz, outlined a future for EMC. Probably the most telling statement came from Tucci himself, when he stated that, “Information is at the core of EMC, not storage.”
Of course ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) is still the flavour of the ‘layer cake’ that is EMC’s strategy. Tucci maintained that 2006 is the year for ILM Phase III; and this phase is when, “…we really make it (ILM) real”.
That said, storage and storage management (especially IP-based storage) still ranked high-up the agenda. “We are building intelligence into information management”, says Tucci – by which I take it to mean, ‘information management systems’. And back on the security message, the chairman stated that, “Everything we do, every layer, we add security”.
Launches
>The storage-based launches include:
The Connectrix MDS 9513 Multilayer Director, and Fibre Channel Switching modules. Based on Cisco technology the MD 9513 is capable of scaling to 528 1/2/4 gigabytes per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel ports, and up to 44 10Gbps FC ports in a single box. The additional modules enable existing Connectrix users to upgrade to 192 and 336-ports. Both offerings offer multi-protocol support for iSCSI, FCIP and FICON.
On the software – and ‘software as service’ – front, EMC offers the Smarts Storage Insight for Availability . This integrates with with EMC's ControlCenter storage resource management and device management software to automatically discover Fibre Channel storage network elements and the interrelationship between those elements and IP networks.
Next up is – and again using technology from the 2005 US$260million acquisition of System Management ARTS Inc (Smarts) - the Smarts Application Discovery Manager resource management software for discovering and creating a real-time, interactive model of application environment. This fits into ILM because, according to Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of resource management for the EMC Software Group, "Without knowing what the applications are, the infrastructure is meaningless”.
The show – a slickly managed affair – has traditionally been aimed at IT professionals, primarily in the storage hardware area. This year, however, DeWaltz took centre stage to close the Tucci-opened keynote addresses. A self-proclaimed ‘west coast’ denizen of the west coast – in contrast to the east coast-based hardware division, DeWaltz presented the multi-branded EMC software stable’s strategies for the future. With 37% of the EMC’s current revenues under his belt already, the energetic former Documentum CEO, made it clear that made the case that EMC was already the world’s seventh biggest software manufacturer in the world – behind CA and, pointedly Symantec/Veritas.
His claim is that the major challenge for Phase III of ILM is, “Understanding unstructured data.” Leading the list is, of course, email archiving and retrieval. The message for information management professionals is implicit: dealing with databased data is almost a done deal now. It’s the millions of files, including images, audio and other ‘rich media’ that we should be turning our attention to.
The keys for ILM here, according to DeWaltz, are firmly embedded in the ongoing issues surrounding compliance – specifically legal compliance. “ILM has to decreased recovery time while increasing the granularity of the recovered, data” – or information; the lines between the two appear a little fuzzy. Essentially what this means is that organisations globally need to access all those email archives faster and – at speed – in greater and more relevant detail.
The Small-to-Medium (sized) Business (SMB) of 25-to-500 people rated high on the software – and by extension corporate - vision for the future with SMB-priced rollouts of, “many of the new product launches” promised.
Storage and server virtualisation, according to Tucci, is “A game changing technology.” He personally believes that the next three years will see all storage and server hardware virtualised.” A big statement, but with VMware as a big investment, and cost reduction and ease of management a major concern for most organisations, not a surprising one. VMare and Invista (the networked storage virtualization system running on intelligent SAN switches).Interestingly, new VMware-based launches were not announced but there are strong rumours of June launches – more when I know. Also of interest is that while purchases such as the the 25-person Authentica, and imaging company Captiva come under the EMC Software Group, VMware appears to operate autonomously within the parent company.
So, back to security and a red rag to Symantec/Veritas and its traditionally ‘perimeter-based’ security offerings. From what I understood directly from Dennis Hoffman, “Security structures that exist today are simply not effective. They secure perimeters not data – and data is constantly traversing perimeters.” If that isn’t strong enough, Hoffman also made plain his opinion that there is no growth or profit in current security offerings, “It is not an area in which we are interested.” Just to ram the point home, he baldly stated that, “Security is a subset of information management. EMC is being brought into the debate because of who we are. The security market is coming to EMC.”
Reinforcing these brassy claims, he told me that the new take on security management is to embed the security in the document, because once you’ve done this, “You don’t need to secure the fence.” An opinion that has been supported both by rivals Netapp and Symantec, despite Hoffman’s parting shot at the latter that, “The Symantec/Veritas combination makes absolutely no sense to me”.
Almost tacked at the end of his presentation was the revelation that EMC’s security group (which has purview over both software and hardware) is introducing Security Assessment Services, including Assessment for Storage Security; basically teams of EMC staffers who will move through an organisation’s storage systems providing recommendations for EMC security solutions from end-to-end to embedded.
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