The alliance, announced today, is aimed at reducing costs and improving efficiencies for both large enterprises and service providers.
The two companies are jointly developing and marketing products based on EMC's information storage systems and software and Nortel's OPTera Metro multiservice platform. Managed service providers and storage service providers can start offering the solutions to their customers immediately, officials said.
"The bottom line is, it provides storage on demand over a bandwidth-on-demand network," said Bill Nelson, senior vice president of content and information centre markets for EMC. "It offers a high-speed, Fibre Channel interface over an optical network."
From fixed to variable
The alliance is targeting enterprises primarily through the service providers. By having storage and optical networking on one platform, service providers will be able to expand the range of customers they can attract as well as the services they offer. Enterprises have a high-end option for managing, storing and accessing their data over campus, metro and wide area systems.
"It takes a fixed expense (in-house storage) to the enterprise and makes it a variable expense," Nelson said. "They only pay for what they use."
However, larger enterprises also are able to take advantage of the technology in-house by developing their own data centres, he said.
EMC and Nortel have been working for almost a year integrating their technologies.
