Storage: Interviews

EMC in April announced a multi-year agreement with Intel that allows the chipmaker to resell EMC's latest low-end storage arrays. The two companies also signed an expanded technology development agreement. At the same time, Dell is saying its four-year-old reseller partnership with EMC has garnered 15,000 joint customers. But as EMC continues to drive more of its products into the low-end space -- until now, Dell's bailiwick -- some analysts see a coming conflict. And at least one said the EMC and Intel partnership could send Dell packing. Praveen Asthana, director of Dell's Enterprise Storage Unit, spoke to Lucas Mearian about EMC, Intel and its own technology road map. The following are excerpts from the interview.

Ameritrade completed its acquisition of TD Waterhouse in January to become TD Ameritrade Holding Just prior to the completion of that acquisition, Ameritrade finished rolling out technology that encrypts all data as it moves from servers to tape backup devices. The encryption effort was a reaction to the company's loss of a data tape with the names of 200,000 clients in April 2005. Jerry Bartlett, CIO at TD Ameritrade, spoke with Computerworld recently about data security and storage management.

Sun Microsystems recently announced new servers based on its UltraSparc T1 processor but still remained mum on its storage plans. The new vice-president of strategy and planning for Sun's Data Management Group, Randy Kerns, spoke about the status of the integration of recently acquired StorageTek and Sun's plan to address the coming threat to tape systems of holographic storage.

Despite taking some market share from EMC this past quarter, Hitachi Data Systems remains in fifth place for external and internal disk storage sales, behind EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell. Dave Roberson, president and chief operating officer of HDS, spoke with Computerworld about how virtualization and tiered storage has been instrumental in grabbing market share. He also acknowledged that his company's go-to-market strategy needs an adrenaline boost, with lower-end systems and better reseller partnerships being key to moving up the food chain.

Michael Feinberg, chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard Co.'s StorageWorks division, spoke with Computerworld at the Storage Decisions conference here this week about planned layoffs at HP (See story), the replacement earlier this year of CEO Carly Fiorina with Mark Hurd and about how that has affected his division. Feinberg also talked about the recent acquisition of storage resource management vendor AppIQ (See story).

Smart USB (Universal Serial Bus) drives based on U3's computing platform hit the market this week and will enable applications to run directly off the portable drives without relying on a host computer. SanDisk and Verbatim announced USB smart drives based on U3's platform, while software companies America Online and Mozilla ported applications to run on U3-compliant smart drives.

Sun Microsystems' $US4.1 billion acquisition of Storage Technology was expected to close on September 1, leaving in its wake a much smaller independent tape-vendor market. Executive vice-president of the Network Storage Products Group at Sun Microsystems, Mark Canepa, will be overseeing the combined Sun/StorageTek division.

Storage switch maker McData in January acquired CNT, a leader in WAN extension and long-distance data replication technology. Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor recently sat down with McData CEO, Chairman and President John Kelly to chat about the reasons why McData acquired CNT and the state of the Fibre Channel switch market.

If you think Network Appliance's (NetApp) recent partnership with IBM was about getting the storage server vendor into the enterprise, Dan Warmenhoven wants you to think again. The company is already there, and enterprise customers are helping to fuel the company's extraordinary sales growth says NetApp's chief executive officer.

Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Network Storage Products Group for Sun Microsystems, will be oversee the US$4.3 billion buyout of Storage Technology, and will likely lead the company once it becomes a part of Sun. Canepa spoke with Computerworld about how Sun plans to address StorageTek user concerns around service and support and product synergies.

Rambus Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Harold Hughes hopes his company's name won't always remind the memory industry of black-robed judges and endless pages of court filings.