EMC unveils storage management middleware

EMC has announced WideSky, a storage management middleware technology, to address the complex issues of managing a multi-vendor storage infrastructure.

Through a new access mechanism, WideSky masks the underlying complexity of multiple vendors` products, including storage systems, network devices and host storage resources. WideSky extends EMC management software to non-EMC environments and its availability makes possible a new generation of integrated storage management applications that are freed from having to know the details of the underlying components.

"Customers are demanding open integration - the ability to freely choose the elements in their environment, while still having the capability to manage it as a whole," says Alex Robertson, country Systems Engineer and Professional Services Manager at EMC SA. "With WideSky, the storage management market has evolved to the next level - powerful, supportable management applications that work across multi-vendor environments."

Bob Passmore, Research Director at Gartner, says: "Technology that enables customers to manage their entire heterogeneous environment will simplify management, decrease time to market and lower total cost of ownership."

EMC is also announcing multiple products that take advantage of the new WideSky storage middleware, including EMC ControlCenter/Open Edition, EMC ControlCenter StorageScope and EMC ControlCenter Replication Manager.

As part of WideSky 1.0, EMC is announcing support for:

* Storage Systems: EMC Symmetrix, EMC CLARiiON (and Dell/EMC FC Series), EMC Celerra, Compaq, HDS, Hewlett-Packard, SUN, IBM and Network Appliance.

* Switches: EMC Connectrix (all models), Brocade, McData, Qlogic.

* Hosts: Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, MPE/iX; Microsoft Windows 2000, NT; Linux; FreeBSD; Novell NetWare; IBM AIX, OS/390 mainframe, AS/400; Sun Solaris; Compaq Computer Corporation Tru64 Unix; Digital Equipment Corporation (Compaq) Digital Unix (DEC OSF/1), Open VMS; NCR UNIX_SV; SCO UnixWare; Sequent DYNIX/ptx; SGI IRIX; Siemens Nixdorf SINIX-Y, SINIX-N.

* Databases: Oracle, Informix, IBM DB2 & UDB, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 & Server 7.

* Logical Volume Managers: IBM AIX LVM, SUN VxVM, Veritas VxVM, HP LVM, Compaq LSM, Windows Disk ADM, LDM, LDM Pro, Sequent SVM, Solstice

* File Systems: IBM AIX JFS, Veritas VxFS, HP-HFS, VFS WideSky is available immediately with current EMC ControlCenter applications and will be included with all new ECC applications moving forward.