Features - Storage Innovations:

EMC INTRODUCES NETWORK-AWARE VOLUME MGMT AND DATA MOBILITY

EMC Corporation has unveiled its blueprint for enabling customers to optimize, simplify and automate the end-to-end management of the data path -- key underlying capabilities that deliver the distributed intelligence powering EMC's AutoIS strategy. EMC announced the underpinning technology of this strategy by announcing major enhancements to the widely popular EMC PowerPath software, including the addition of integrated volume management, multi-vendor array support, and application availability features such as non-disruptive upgrades. The company also outlined future directions for end-to-end data path management, featuring seamless data mobility and intelligent network capabilities.

Erez Ofer, EMC executive vice president, Open Software Operations, said, "Delivering application availability and seamless mobility takes more than point products--it takes powerful new software technologies that can deliver intelligent end-to-end data path management, from the application to the disk drive. As customers look to deliver higher application service levels, simplify complex storage infrastructures, and reduce their management costs, this approach to integrated path management is essential."

Michael Fisch, Analyst with the Clipper Group said, "From an individual disk drive to the application, every point along the data path affects the quality of service. It is not enough to manage just one point along the way, nor is it enough to manage every point along the way in isolation, not considering the upstream and downstream effects. Storage quality of service depends on the proper balance and maintenance of the entire data path, from start to finish."

The centerpiece of the announcement is a groundbreaking new version of EMC's popular PowerPath software. With more than 85,000 deployments to date, PowerPath increases application availability and performance, reduces the complexity and cost of storage networking, and simplifies management in one powerful solution. PowerPath enables multiple channels between servers, switches, and storage to share the I/O workload in order to provide automatic load-balancing, path-failover, and dynamic recovery capabilities that optimize data path resources.

The new version of PowerPath furthers the breadth and depth of these capabilities with a number of new features.

Network-Aware Volume Management

EMC PowerPath now offers integrated volume management through the PowerPath Volume Manager feature, a logical volume manager that maximizes storage allocation efficiency and simplifies the configuration and management of the storage infrastructure. PowerPath Volume Manager offers all of the robust volume management tools customers look for, including striping, mirroring, and slicing of volumes, as well as allocating physical storage into logical -- or "virtual" -- pools for on-line storage volume re-configuration.

Steve Gray, Systems Manger at Phoenix News said, "In order to help us simplify management and optimize the use of our storage resources, we're looking for tools that provide the end-to-end management of the data path and go beyond traditional path management or volume management tools offer. With the new PowerPath, it appears that EMC is able to deliver on this need, while at the same time allowing us to extend and leverage our existing resources."

PowerPath Volume Manager has been designed to take advantage of the intelligent path management features of PowerPath, making it the first "network aware" volume manager in the industry. Specifically, PowerPath Volume Manager can:

• Automatically detect the expansion of hardware-based volumes, and re-size the associated logical volume group to use the free space available, without disruption;
• Seamlessly import mirrored copies of a volume to the same host for backup, restore, and repurposing activities;
• Set policies to optimize disk resources to improve the performance and capacity utilization of new and expanded volumes; and
• Provide I/O performance statistics for each volume to analyze and tune performance

As part of the integrated EMC PowerPath application, PowerPath Volume Manager reduces the number of tools customers need to bring into their infrastructure environments. Furthermore, PowerPath's volume management features can be controlled through the EMC ControlCenter.

The PowerPath Volume Manager feature is included with EMC PowerPath at no additional charge.

Charles B. Shepard, Lead Systems Engineer at MGM MIRAGE, said "Reducing networked storage complexity without sacrificing configuration flexibility or application availability is the dream of any SAN manager. Coupled with additional heterogeneous support, volume management and non-disruptive data movement features in the latest version of PowerPath, it looks as if EMC is working to make that dream come true."

Application-Transparent Data Mobility

Building on its path and volume management functions, EMC PowerPath will offer application-transparent data mobility as part of the overall PowerPath feature set in Q3 2003. This functionality will enable customers to move online application data from one storage array to another in a networked storage environment without impacting application performance or availability. PowerPath will be able to automatically re-configure the application to access data at a new location, regardless of array vendor, type, size, or RAID configuration.

As a result, the application is insulated from the physical storage and the movement of data within the storage network, greatly simplifying storage management tasks. Furthermore, this new feature assists customers in delivering higher service levels and in meeting rapidly changing business requirements.

Chris Gahagan, EMC senior vice president of Infrastructure Software added, "Path management is much more than providing fail-over and load balancing capability -- it's about ensuring 100% application availability regardless of where the application data is or what path the data takes. By taking advantage of the intelligence in the network, PowerPath does this, and enables customers to do things they never could before -- move data from one array to another without disrupting the application, grow volume sizes automatically, and manage multi-vendor storage easily and quickly."

Driving Intelligence Into the Network

EMC is focused on driving intelligence throughout the storage network to provide customers with the option and ability to take advantage of groundbreaking advances in storage technology. In doing so, EMC will look to deploy aspects of the PowerPath feature set into existing and emerging intelligent switch technology. This effort will be focused on allowing customers to extend the value of their existing automated networked storage environments while introducing new, fabric-based capabilities that simplify and automate those environments.

Additional Enhancements

In keeping with EMC's focus on software that supports multi-vendor environments, the new version of PowerPath will offer support for heterogeneous storage arrays beginning in 2003 including arrays from Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, and Hewlett Packard, as well as support for all major operating systems including Windows, Linux, and well-known UNIX variants (HP-UX and AIX).

In addition, this new version also offers non-disruptive upgrades for future versions of PowerPath software, eliminating the need to stop and re-boot servers for updates.