"EMC's approach to storage virtualization will add substantial value to an enterprise's infrastructure, without adding to the overhead"

With his recent appointment at EMC, Sonik Parwal has brought with him more
than a decade's expertise with leading IT companies like HP, Oracle and
Microsoft. At EMC, he will spearhead the distribution and systems integrators'
strategy and deepen current partnerships. Sonik will also foster new alliances
to further enhance the company's coverage of diverse markets.

What is the focus of the Velocity Partner program?

The focus of the Velocity workshops is to provide training
and development to partners, specifically on the EMC CLARiiON and Legato range
of products. They were also given EMC accreditation after completing the
five-day workshop.

Whenever some one signs up with EMC, they need to invest in
terms of people or financial resources. Our channel program will be geared
towards ensuring that the initial investment is minimal and they will be able to
recoup their initial
investment even within two quarters.

How is EMC evangelizing virtualization of storage in
India?

Organizations require the ability to allocate storage to any
application based on the needs of the business and to be able do those without
disruption. Networked storage virtualization can enable organizations to deliver
the right information at the right performance level and the right functionality
to the business at the lowest total cost.

EMC believes that it
is critical to implement virtualization within an intelligent switch environment
in an open, non-proprietary fashion. We are an active participant in an
industry-wide effort around network-based virtualization and have made key
architectural decision to leverage an open, standards-based approach that writes
to vendors and APIs rather than develop custom code for each supported platform.

Who are the takers for this concept?

EMC is working with its Connectrix-branded switch partners-Brocade,
Cisco and McData-to give its customers the widest choice of networking
switches. Also, the policies should be driven by the management systems that are
present in the environment. 

Virtualization shouldn't necessarily have its own set of
policies. It should be driven by overall management systems. Integrated
management that can incorporate policies is a very important consideration in
implementing virtualization.

Companies that have large, diverse and complex environments
are looking to simplify the management of these environments. They are good
customers for implementing virtualization.  Some of the verticals where we
have seen early interest have been in the telecommunications, financial services
and retail industries. But it's certainly not confined to these
verticals. 

What hindrances do you face in virtualization of storage?

Market acceptance has been slow, but will begin to take off
later this year as more robust, enterprise-class storage virtualization
solutions come to the market. EMC's approach to storage virtualization is one
that will add substantial value to the enterprise without adding substantial
overhead, cost or impacting existing applications or functionality.

Early storage virtualization implementations fall short on
these requirements. New implementations will be developed with an open approach
that is highly compatible with industry efforts to develop a standard API for
SAN-based applications.

What are your predictions for the next couple of years?

Some trends, which will drive the growth for EMC in the
future would be:

Information Lifecycle Management: It is a key trend that is
fast catching up globally and we are seeing some signs of adoption in India as
well. EMC's vision is to help customers move, organize and manage information
more efficiently at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).  

Storage Virtualization: It is the ability to separate
software business applications from the specific hardware device. Because of
storage virtualization, IT is able to use existing servers and storage devices
and only add on additional software. It can integrate it with existing
management tools and IT can continue using its existing functional management
software.

Content Addressed Storage (CAS): With the explosive growth in
the fixed content, CAS will be a key technology in 2005. CAS provides a digital
fingerprint (ID or logical address) and ensures that it is the exact piece of
data that was saved. The kind of information stored on a CAS device would
include medical images, sales invoices, archived emails check images, electronic
statements and completed CAD/CAM designs.

How is EMC trying to build its marketshare? 

We have been constantly educating the market on the need to
move away from direct attached storage to server agnostic automated networked
storage architecture. We have launched over 17 new products and software
innovations for the Indian market. Of the 17, 11 are specifically targeted at
the mid-tier segment.

The company has invested three logistic and spare parts
depots in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore to ensure timely availability of spare
parts to our customers and engineers. EMC introduced products and solutions for
the mid-tier across SAN and NAS segment in August 2004.

What plans are on the anvil for partners?

SMB is the focus area for EMC. We are focused towards
training channel partners on an ongoing basis for various EMC solutions. The
company recently organized Velocity workshops, which covered the entire spectrum
of channel partners across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

The five day workshops, each across the three cities were to
enable and train over 180 representatives from the channel community. The
training was categorized in three divisions-sales, pre-sales and services. 

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