EMC's incredible Hulk

EMC has opened the kimono on its product roadmap and the future is filled with the HULK, MAMBA, MAIU and HomeStore. This was revealed at an Innovation Day conference at the Museum of Science, Franklin, Massachusetts, on November 14th. EMC execs revealed more detail on the four bare bones described at EMC's October quarterly results meeting.

These products should ship before the fourth quarter of next year.

MAMBA

MAMBA is an acronym for a storage product aimed at small and medium enterprises (SME) and departments. EMC wants to pay more attention to SMEs; which vendor doesn't? Think of it as a Mark II Clariion AX.

HULK

HULK, another acronym, is a clustered network-attached storage (NAS) hardware product providing NAS performance at the Isilon and BlueArc levels. It is intended for Web 2.0 or 'Cloud' applications, according to Tucci, meaning it will be highly scalable in capacity, and performance through multiple controllers. The target applications involve massive amounts of file serving in commercial environments. Internet-based utility computing companies will be a sales target for HULK.

NetApp has its clusterable NAS products based on ONTAP GX, but Isilon and BlueArc have been making clustered NAS sales while NetApp has had a slow start to its high-performance NAS product delivery and selling.

MAUI

The software to operate HULK is called MAUI, a third acronym. It is built on a clustered file system base and provides what EMC called a global repository. Perhaps the Rainfinity global namespace technology will be part of this. It will provide a capacity for handling very large numbers of files spread across multiple NAS boxes (clustered) within a single file namespace

HomeStore

This is a product to be shipped by Intel, or Intel's channel, aimed at the home storage of data and using EMC software, suggesting a kind of consumer NAS box with media-serving capability. It could serve video files to a games console.

Think of a 4TB device using a developed Retrospect code product. It seems to be related to, or identical with, the LifeLine product supplied to Intel. An EMC staffer said HomeStore would be purchasable in Q1 2008 for under $2,000 (about £1,000).

Well, yes, the idea of paying around a £1,000 for a home media file storage box seems ridiculous. Under £500 would be better (about $1,000).

Containerised data services

EMC CEO Joe Tucci said the Symmetrix would, at last, get thin provisioning soon. This will drive up capacity utilisation by spoofing applications with LUNs that their LUN is fully populated with drives when it is not; only having enough drives to meet data writing requirements plus a margin. If more space is needed then the storage admin person gets alerted and more drives can be transparently added to the Sym' array. The term 'containerised data services' has been used in connection with thin provisioning which will be applied to Centera, Celerra and Clariion as well as to the high end Sym' arrays.

Such an approach might be used for cross-array products like replication and snapshots as well.