EMC Melds ECM, ILM, Virtualization Into Single Storage Strategy

EMC managed to bring the storage industry's two top buzzwords - ILM and virtualization - together as part of a single industry trend at its EMC Technology Summit conference in New Orleans in May. According to officials of the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage giant, the need to archive and retrieve data safely and cost effectively requires both a way to virtualize storage resources to make them easily accessible to different applications, and a tiered approach to migrate data based on its value.

Jeffrey Nick, senior vice president and CTO of EMC, said that customers are looking to build a strategy for ILM, or information life cycle management, and need a framework into which ILM can be plugged. "In order for ILM to be understood and adopted, customers are being asked, 'How does it fit with other dimensions of IT?'" he said.

EMC is focused on tightly coordinating the components of its ILM strategy with technology that supports data migration, protection and security, said Nick. This includes its Documentum enterprise content management (ECM), VMware server virtualization and new Invista storage virtualization, he said. It also includes the Smarts application-based storage management technology the company recently acquired.

"If we bring storage management capabilities and orchestrate them with an application-oriented view of the storage topology, the ability to manage resources in the same way that VMware and Invista do, and traditional enterprise content management capabilities, then ILM really starts to take shape," Nick said. By tying these technologies together, customers will be able to understand how their IT resources are being consumed, which applications are being served and how their data is being processed, he asserted. "They can then start to build out intelligent, automated ILM."

Because EMC's Invista virtualization technology does not sit in the data path, it virtualizes customers' existing storage infrastructures and does not require the use of new arrays or storage management software, explained Mark Lewis, EVP and chief development officer for EMC. "Rule No. 1 is, Don't mess with a customer's existing infrastructure," he said. "Just build value around it."

Courtesy of CRN, a CMP publication.