VISUALIZATION

PALM DESERT, CA -- EMC today reaffirmed its full support of cooperative industry activities to develop robust standards for open storage management. In doing so, EMC joined a number of storage-focused vendors, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) in promoting the Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) technologies designed to create a standard interface for the management of multi-vendor storage networks. Speaking at the Storage Networking World (SNW) Spring 2002 Conference in Palm Desert, Chuck Hollis, EMC Vice President of Markets and Products, said, "CIM presents a great opportunity for our customers and the industry. By reducing the effort associated with achieving full management interoperability, everyone wins—software vendors, storage vendors, and most importantly, the customers who rely on us. Every customer should be demanding that their vendors actively support all relevant standards—whether industry-driven or vendor-specific. The payoff is too great to delay." While a wide variety of interfaces currently exist for gathering information about heterogeneous storage resources, CIM will define a standard set of parameters to access information about managing them. EMC believes CIM offers a promising model around which the storage industry will collaborate on open storage management. For this reason, EMC is actively involved in CIM development and co-chairs the SNIA working group responsible for actively developing storage-based components of CIM. EMC is also participating with several other vendors in a demonstration of CIM-based storage management functionality at the SNW Spring 2002 Conference. Using CIM/WBEM Client technology, EMC management software will be able to discover, manage, monitor, and report on multi-vendor storage elements included in a single interoperable management environment. Additionally, through EMC's CIM Provider technology, EMC storage systems can be monitored by other vendors' CIM Clients in the same environment. In addition to driving the development and future adoption of the CIM standard, EMC intends to extend the value of CIM by integrating the finalized CIM standard into the recently announced EMC WideSky middleware, enabling customers to take advantage of both API and standards-based interfaces for managing heterogeneous storage environments. WideSky is the industry's first storage management middleware technology that addresses the complex issues of managing a multivendor storage infrastructure. WideSky incorporates a number of industry-based interfaces (e.g. CIM, SNMP, MIBs) and vendor-based interfaces (e.g. APIs and CLIs) to provide independent software vendors a common access mechanism to incorporate a wide range of storage management capabilities into their products. An important part of EMC's AutoIS strategy to make storage management simple, automated and open, WideSky masks the underlying complexity of multiple vendors' products, including storage systems, network devices and host storage resources. Hollis added, "Today, WideSky plays an essential role in driving the acceptance of CIM by building a bridge between past investments and future implementations. By using WideSky as their open storage middleware today, customers can incorporate CIM-compatible technologies when they become available, while continuing to leverage WideSky's unique integration functionality." For more information visit www.emc.com