EMC, HP sign technology agreement

EMC and Hewlett-Packard Company, global enterprise storage providers, have agreed to cross-license storage system application programming interfaces (APIs). The technology exchange will facilitate each company`s development of storage management applications capable of managing their respective storage systems.

Alex Robertson, country systems engineer and professional services manager at EMC SA, says: "Companies like EMC and HP are going to great lengths to promote universal interoperability in heterogeneous storage environments. Along with our combined efforts to further development of open industry standards - such as CIM and Bluefin - technology exchanges such as this enable our mutual customers to realise the benefits of that interoperability much sooner. EMC believes that this kind of technology exchange can serve as a model for agreements with other companies and thereby accelerate the industry`s progress toward solving the interoperability concerns of our customers."

According to industry analyst estimates, the storage systems technology addressed under this exchange represents more than 70% of the combined revenue market share for networked external RAID storage in 2001, and more than 50% of the overall external RAID revenue market share for 2001.

Under the terms of the agreement, EMC is licensing APIs to support discovery and control functions of EMC Symmetrix and EMC CLARiiON storage systems. HP is licensing APIs to support discovery and control functions of the HP StorageWorks Virtual Array (VA) systems and the HP StorageWorks XP systems.

This agreement expands on a previous agreement between EMC and Compaq, which merged with HP in May 2002. The previous agreement included API support for EMC Symmetrix and EMC CLARiiON storage systems and Compaq StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays and StorageWorks Modular Array systems. In addition, the companies will define cooperative support levels so that end-users of the respective storage management products can be assured that each vendor will provide support for its configurations.