EMC and Veritas have agreed to exchange a wide range of application
programming interfaces (APIs) for storage system and storage software
technologies, making it easier for organizations to implement and
integrate products from each company.
The agreement unites the top two players in the storage management
software market. EMC has a 30.4% share of the market and Veritas a 19.8% share,
according to Gartner/Dataquest.
Over the past seven years, EMC and Veritas Software have worked together
to integrate their respective technologies and provide customers with
the highest levels of interoperability, the companies said. The new
agreement extends access to previously exchanged APIs and includes new
APIs relating to storage arrays, volume and file management, and
replication features.
“EMC will now have the ability to add greater functionality to their
management solutions, particularly the ARM solution,” said Nancy
Marrone, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. “Having volume
management and replication APIs enables EMC to add additional capability
to their automated management solutions, particularly assigning volumes
from heterogeneous arrays. I’m not sure when EMC will announce any
additional capabilities, but these APIs will definitely make the
assignment of resources in heterogeneous SANs easier for EMC.”
Under the terms of the agreement, EMC will be licensing APIs to Veritas
to provide broader support for EMC Symmetrix and CLARiiON storage
systems as well as for Celerra network servers. Veritas Software will be licensing
APIs to EMC for supporting mapping, control, and replication functions of
the Veritas Volume Manager, Veritas File System, and Veritas Foundation
Suite products. Additionally, the companies will define cooperative
support levels so that end users of the respective storage system and
storage management products can receive joint support for the integrated
product offerings.
Steve Kenniston, technology analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, noted that Veritas has already been using a few EMC APIs for some products. He called the new agreement “a bigger formalization of the relationship that had been going on for a while.”
Kenniston said he’d like to see even more synergy between the two storage management giants, but that the expanded agreement will help. “Sharing this information can
help make storage management easier,” Kenniston said. “At the end of the day, it should help end users more successfully integrate their storage management infrastructure.”