EMC Outlines Path To CIM/Bluefin Compatibility

EMC today outlined its plans to provide developer partners and customers with the tools to drive standards-compliant, open storage management solutions into real-world environments. These plans build on EMC’s continuing work with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and its member companies to further develop and speed finalization of the Storage Management Initiative (SMI) (previously known as CIM/Bluefin) specification and expands on EMC’s announcement last month that all of EMC’s hardware and software will be SMI compliant with initial product implementation starting next year.

Major activities highlighted in today’s announcement include:

• EMC will incorporate the emerging SMI specification into the EMC WideSky Developers Suite, allowing developers to quickly and securely create applications that can manage SMI-compliant devices. EMC will release SMI-enabled WideSky Software Developer Kits (SDKs) in 2003.
• EMC will feature fully functional versions of EMC hardware and software products that leverage the SMI specification through WideSky storage management middleware at next week’s Storage Networking World Conference in Orlando.
• To further encourage storage hardware and software vendors to incorporate SMI technologies into their products, EMC will sponsor the first SNIA Storage Management Summit at the SNIA Technology Center in Colorado Springs between December 3rd and 5th.

In addition to these announcements, EMC also today unveiled the expansion of the WideSky Developers Suite to include new and enhanced interfaces that offer broad heterogeneous device support and increased functionality for managing platform-, connectivity-,and server-based storage resources.

Charles King, Senior Analyst at the Sageza Group, said, “Providing true heterogeneous storage management solutions will not be a quick or easy task. Paramount among the challenges facing the industry is how to drive the acceptance of standards-based products without abandoning or short changing legacy and non-standards based technologies. The universal translation middleware that is part of EMC WideSky should allow EMC and its developer partners to drive CIM/Bluefin products into the marketplace – without leaving some customers out in the cold.”

Mark Lewis, EMC Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of New Ventures, said, “Industry leaders have a responsibility to further the acceptance and implementation of standards into robust, customer-friendly applications. But at the same time, we also have a responsibility to provide developers with the capabilities to create solutions that reach across the universe of storage infrastructures and protect customer investments in existing technologies. By incorporating the SMI specification into the WideSky framework, EMC is creating a development tool that is greater than the sum of its parts, paving the way for the scores of our developer partners to easily and quickly offer next generation solutions.”