EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) has inked a licensing deal with startup Storigen Systems Inc. for software that translates EMC's Centera proprietary interface into standard file protocols -- providing a workaround for one of the system's most obvious shortcomings.
Introduced a year ago, EMC's Centera is a high-end storage system purpose-built to store massive amounts of "fixed content," data that doesn't change once it's been created, using inexpensive ATA-based disk drives (see EMC Has Eyes for Huge Archives).
But one of the barriers to Centera's adoption, apart from the $100,000-plus starting price, has been that it requires applications to be rewritten so they can speak a proprietary Centera application programming interface (API).
The Storigen software, which runs on a standard Linux-based PC, eliminates that requirement. It acts as a translation gateway between Centera's API and standard Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File System (NFS) protocols, allowing applications that haven't been rewritten for Centera to access the system.
"From a business perspective, it broadens the overall audience for Centera without having to worry about writing to its API," says Tony Prigmore, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group Inc.
