Storage industry partnerships abound

The buzz in storage this spring has reached the decibel range, and the noise will continue this week at Storage Networking World in Phoenix.

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In the weeks prior to the show, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, and Network Appliance all bolstered their storage rosters by partnering, introducing new products, or both.

Last Wednesday IBM partnered with NetApp to re-brand and resell NetApp's line of NAS systems. For its part, NetApp will enhance the integration between NetApp systems and IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager products.

Likewise, Hitachi announced late last week that it will offer CommVault's QiNetix data protection and reliability software across its storage product line. Hitachi will co-brand CommVault's software as the Hitachi Data Protection Suite and integrate it into the Hitachi Business Continuity Solutions framework, said Brian Householder, senior director of business development at Hitachi. "This will allow us to better serve the Windows market, because that is where CommVault's products are strong," Householder said. Hitachi also plans to shortly announce additional data-recovery and data-retention products, he said.

Randy Kerns, an analyst at Evaluator Group, said the deals between CommVault and Hitachi, and IBM and NetApp, represent an important trend in storage.

Kerns said EMC, Hitachi, HP, and IBM are all delivering major components of their storage virtualization plans this year, and storage vendors are lining up to be included in their plans. EMC, for instance, has partnered with Cisco to develop its storage router, which EMC plans to ship by the end of the second quarter.

Also partnering last week were Brocade and Emulex, which will offer a SAN installation and management tool for their HBA and switch products. EZPilot will ease installation and provisioning of a SAN by allowing users to navigate through wizards to deploy required components, including HBAs, switches, and storage arrays from a variety of vendors. EZPilot will be available later this year, the companies said.

On the product front, StorageTek will introduce at the show a new member of its FLX drive-array line. The FLX380 will include the Brocade 4Gbps switch and include more host-side and drive-side channels. The new system is designed for high-end enterprise datacenters, said Jay Seifert, senior manager of product marketing for ILMS (information lifecycle management solutions) at StorageTek. "We believe the move from 2Gbps switches to 4Gbps switches will be relatively easy, so this product will slide right into a customer's current lineup," he said.

Arsenal Digital Solutions, a provider of storage-management services, will introduce at the show a fully managed, on-demand, rapid server-recovery solution for business continuity and disaster recovery. ViaRecovery combines an on-site appliance for business continuity and network-based off-site backup for disaster recovery, said Frank Brick, chairman and CEO of Arsenal. The product is aimed at small and midsize businesses as well as branch offices of larger companies. "All size companies need this type of solution, not just the large corporations. That's why we've tried to simplify the process and make it easy to use," he said.

Hitachi last week released its first NAS device developed in-house, and HP last month unveiled a new version of its HP StorageWorks RISS (Reference Information Storage System), an application-aware, content-based archiving array.