Features - Storage Innovations:

EMC UNVEILS NEW ENHANCEMENTS IN ITS WideSky DEVELOPERS SUITE

EMC Corporation has unveiled major advances in its WideSky Developers Suite offered through the EMC Developers Program. These new advances further EMC's goal of enabling software and hardware developers, along with customers, to build truly open, interoperable automated networked storage environments that reduce costs, streamline management, and improve business agility.

Highlighted in this announcement is the expansion of the WideSky Developers Suite to include new and enhanced interfaces that offer additional heterogeneous device support and increased functionality for managing platform-, connectivity-, and server-based storage resources. EMC will also deliver even greater flexibility to developers and investment protection for customers by incorporating open industry standards into WideSky, such as the emerging Storage Management Initiative (SMI) specification, previously known as the Common Information Model (CIM)/Bluefin specification.

Don Swatik, vice president of EMC's Solutions Group said, "As customers continue to adopt networked storage at a breakneck pace, they're looking to EMC and our application developer partners to be a step ahead and help simplify the management of the entire environment, end-to-end, and not just heterogeneous storage arrays. The burden is on us to enable fast and reliable development of innovative applications that manage the diverse requirements of heterogeneous storage system, network and software elements. The new additions to WideSky do exactly that."

New and Enhanced WideSky Storage Middleware

EMC introduced WideSky in October 2001, building on a history of strong collaboration with partners since 1994. WideSky uses a common architecture to provide access to a robust set of advanced storage management features and serve as a universal "any-to-any" translator for storage management. As a result, application developers can greatly reduce the time and effort needed to develop applications that work across heterogeneous networked storage environments, and are able to focus more on leveraging the depth of functionality and intelligence offered by WideSky. In turn, customers benefit from applications with greater breadth of device support and robust features that reduce integration, management, and training costs. Currently, upwards of twenty-four companies, including some of the largest software vendors in the world, are licensing the WideSky Developers Suite.

The new and enhanced WideSky Developers Suite APIs announced today include:

• WideSky Connectivity API: The new WideSky Connectivity API enables discovery and access to information for SAN elements including switches, bridges, and HBAs, and allows switch zoning. Devices supported by the Connectivity API include switches from EMC (Connectrix), Brocade, McData, Qlogic, and Inrange, and HBAs from Agilent, Emulex, JNI, and Qlogic.
• WideSky Storage API: This first version of the WideSky Storage API provides discovery and enables access to configuration information on EMC, HP StorageWorks, HP XP, HDS 9900, and SUN StoreEdge 9900 storage platforms. Moving forward, the Storage API will also leverage the SMI (CIM/Bluefin) specification to offer even greater breadth of array support and depth of functionality.
• Expanded WideSky SRM API: The WideSky SRM API characterizes and maps host-level application elements (databases, volume managers, and file systems) all the way through to logical and physical storage devices. This API now includes support for HP StorageWorks, HP XP, HDS 9900, and SUN StoreEdge 9900 storage platforms, in addition to previous support for EMC Symmetrix and EMC CLARiiON storage systems. Additionally, the enhanced API also now includes support for Microsoft Exchange. The WideSky SRM API currently provides support for databases from Oracle, Informix, Sybase, SQL Server, and IBM, file systems including UFS, VxFS, HFS, JFS, NTFS, MVS Datasets, ex2 and AdvFS, as well as volume managers including LVM, VxVM, LSM, SVM, DiskADM, and LDM.
• New EMC ControlCenter StorageScope API: Providing access to the rich repository of information delivered by WideSky, this interface enables developers to take advantage of the data collected and stored by the EMC ControlCenter infrastructure to create applications for billing, resource tracking, and infrastructure planning. This data is obtained via ControlCenter StorageScope software, and includes specific information regarding multi-vendor array configurations, SAN devices, host view logical objects (including databases, file systems and volume managers), host servers, and relationships between storage elements.

Additionally, the new WideSky Developers Suite now supports two new interfaces: Java Native Interface (JNI) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) along with current support of a C interface. This allows developers to create applications in their choice of industry-standard languages and reduce their time-to-market in introducing new innovative software products.

Resources for Developers

Additional information about the EMC Developers Program and WideSky Developers' Suite can be found at: www.emc.com/widesky.

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing automated networked storage solutions for organizations across the globe. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.