What happens when two storage specialists get an opportunity to joust? Mark Latchford, General Manager, Systems and Technology Group, IBM Australia and Steve Redman, EMC Asia-Pacific Software group vice president (previously EMC Australia managing director) go head-to-head.
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Latchford: Eighteen months ago, EMC was saying that virtualisation was just an IBM marketing ploy. Now, you've introduced your first virtualisation product; why the change of heart?
Redman: There is no change of heart. We have always believed in using the right technology for the right reasons, and virtualisation is not a cure-all for everything. It doesn't replace existing solutions. It should be used to solve problems you can't solve any other way.
Doing heterogeneous storage management, replication, and reducing storage complexity are not virtualisation issues. Virtualisation brings new solutions, such as the ability to replace hardware non-disruptively and to move volume management into the network.
Redman: What does information lifecycle management (ILM) mean to IBM and its customers?
Latchford: ILM is the process of managing information -- from creation to disposal -- in a manner that aligns costs with the changing value of information. It enables our customers to catalogue, search, archive, retrieve, and destroy information assets in a manner that is consistent with commercial, regulatory and legal requirements.
Central to ILM is the ability to classify and then manage information according to business policies so information can be managed according to its value. These policies can include time and access frequency, events and "permissions" (retention rules assigned to individuals or groups), or some combination thereof.
By enabling ILM technologies in a tiered storage environment, IBM provides many benefits to our customers, including the:
- Intelligent management of information throughout its lifecycle, and, when appropriate, destruction to free up storage resources.
- Improvement in the performance of applications by moving rarely or never accessed information to lower cost storage resources.
- Retention of information assets in accordance with business value as implemented through corporate policies.
- Automation of information lifecycle management, reducing the errors and resources associated with manual approaches to data management.
- Management of information in a manner that optimises storage and access, allowing for efficient utilisation of tiered storage, consolidation of existing storage and skilful planning for storage growth.
Latchford: So, now that EMC has introduced the virtualisation router, is this the total of your virtualisation strategy? Do you have additional virtualisation offerings and choices to offer customers beyond this initial block-based virtualisation router?
Redman: Firstly, EMC has been leading in virtualisation technologies in a number of areas for quite some time (ie, with VMware, the leader in Intel virtualisation, with file-based virtualisation through EMC-NAS and content virtualisation with CAS).
Secondly, EMC Invista already has a stated roadmap which includes additional capabilities such as over-subscription, continuous data protection and heterogeneous replication, and that's just the beginning.
More importantly, customers who use virtualisation technologies today find it very difficult to manage the end to end service level, and only EMC -- through technologies such as SMARTs -- is bringing the management coordination technologies to market, which reconstruct the service level in this distributed and virtualised environment.
