EMC Hits Hardware Refresh

EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), which spent $3.63 billion on software companies last year, today served up a reminder that it is still primarily a hardware company.

EMC refreshed its storage networking products across the board, announcing changes to its Symmetrix and Clariion SAN, Celerra NAS, and Centera content addressed storage (CAS) systems.

With the new releases, EMC is looking to emphasize its role as a supplier of tiered storage, taking particular pains to enhance mainframe support in response to recent announcements from IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). It's also taking aim at a perception that EMC has sacrificed hardware priorities in an effort to compete in the software arena.

"When we bought Legato and Documentum, everybody was saying we're trying to become a software company," Chuck Hollis, VP of platforms marketing at EMC. "We still do hardware."

EMC's new launches include:

None of the announcements is a radical breakthrough, but at least one observer is intrigued by EMC's mainframe emphasis, particularly in the Symmetrix AutoSwap feature.

"There's a subtle shift back to the mainframe," says John Webster, Senior Analyst and Partner of Data Mobility Group. "They added native mainframe support for Centera, which I think was a must-have, because a lot of the data Centera was designed for resides on the mainframe. But the thing that really made me stand back and say, 'Wow, my God, that's quite bold,' is they're going head-to-head with IBM on GDPS. They're doing what GDPS does without GDPS. That's knocking on IBM's door and saying, 'Move over. We can do it better.' "

What EMC hasn't gotten around to yet is full integration of the software it acquired by purchasing Legato, Documentum, and VMware in 2003 (see EMC Gobbles Legato, EMC Cops Documentum and EMC Completes VMware Acquisition).

"What I'm waiting for is when all the tools actually come together under one umbrella that would be very impressive," says Arun Taneja, founder of The Taneja Group.

EMC's platform refreshes did include enhancements to software that it had before the acquisitions, including SAN Copy and SnapView on Clariion and Celerra's management application. So far, though, EMC has continued to sell Legato, Documentum, and VMware software as separate products – often to its systems competitors (see Storage Makes Strange Bedfellows)."Further integration is a given," Webster says, "but they still need to make sure Legato and Documentum can stand on their own for awhile."

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch