EMC Readies ATA Disks for Prime Time

SAN FRANCISCO — The gap between disk and tape storage is about to
get erased, EMC’s Joe Tucci said Thursday.

The EMC president and CEO touted disk-based recovery, disk replication
and back up courtesy of ATA as a way companies can keep up
with the influx of data (a la Sarbanes-Oxley) with a limited budget.
Tucci said he was confident in predicting information growth of more than 60 percent this year and of at least 70 percent in 2005.

“Ninety percent of recovery will be on disk in three years,” Tucci
said during his keynote at the Oracle OpenWorld conference here. “Tape
is not going away, but ATA disk is helping with the rapid adoption of
content-addressed storage.”

In Tucci’s predictions for the storage industry for 2005, ATA disk ranked second on the list, behind Information Lifecycle Management , a buzzword for tracking information throughout a company’s network. Larger capacity disk drives, improvements in iSCSI
and the growth of enterprise Grid computing also made the
list.

The company executive said he’s expecting a range of new drives, from
146GB Fibre Channel for high performance systems to 400GB FC for “fat fibre” drives and even a 500 GB ATA drive is in the works. Tucci noted that his hardware teams will have to build more advanced arrays with more
features to help handle the rush of information being stored.

Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC is looking to take advantage of
virtualization in both servers and storage devices. Tucci said there
would be a lot of “tire kicking” when it came to subdividing the
resources of a storage device, with widespread adoption not materializing
until 2006. Conversely, the executive anticipates an aggressive ramp-up
of server virtualization next year.

VMware is one of those software players that can play to both servers
and storage. The EMC subsidiary is expected to announce a technology,
service and support partnership with Oracle Monday.
A spokesperson with VMware said all Oracle Server Technologies
development teams will standardize on VMware virtual infrastructure as
their standard Oracle Linux and Windows x86 development, test and support environment.

Part of the strategy with Oracle includes a new EMC Oracle Database
10g Accelerator. The joint services offering allows Oracle and EMC to
work in tangent with a customer and outline a database/storage blueprint
developed by both companies. Oracle will then re-locate the customer’s
database onto an EMC Symmetrix, EMC CLARiiON or EMC Celerra networked
storage stack using Oracle configuration software. EMC would then follow
up with its TimeFinder or SnapView software to replicate the database
for testing and accelerated migration to Oracle Database 10g.

Tucci said DBAs are using VMware and Oracle in a series of instant
creation and teardown scenarios, testing the developments and workloads
to see how they crash and burn, then learning from it.

Tucci noted VMware and Documentum were critical
acquisitions to EMC’s new directive of “where information lives.” The
CEO hinted that, while he has a great partnership with Dell, there might be a future in building a combination server-storage device.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com