On another front, shifting alliances, either through reseller or OEM deals, have become key weapons for many vendors, as seen in a new OEM deal between IBM and NetApp. Cisco Systems has also signed up to resell EMC NAS appliances. Cisco might also sign to resell entry-level SAN arrays from EMC, according to a report by RBC Capital Markets.
Those moves might benefit competitors Brocade and McData as EMC's rivals back away from Cisco. HP, meanwhile, continues to battle its rivals on multiple fronts. Mark Gonzales, vice-president of enterprise storage and server sales, says the company is enhancing its mid-range EVA array for ease-of-use in multi-vendor and multi-operating system environments.
New virtual tape appliances, iSCSI arrays and the StorageWorks Grid will roll out at HP's National Storage Conference, Gonzales adds. Since EMC's acquisition of Legato nearly two years ago, it and Veritas have become the bitterest of rivals.
That rivalry spawned an alliance between Veritas and NetApp against their common foe over the past 12 to 18 months, with several projects in the works to integrate Veritas' Net Backup software and NetApp's NAS appliances and Snaplock software, says Jeremy Burton, executive vice-president for data management at Veritas. 'We want to see less and less EMC hardware and software,' he says.
Veritas, which is being acquired by Symantec in a US$13.5 billion deal, is also making a push in the disk-based backup space with new software optimised for this area, Burton says. Once the deal is done, Symantec expects to invigorate its channel push by putting its own managers in charge of channel sales for the combined company while letting Veritas people handle direct sales, Symantec chief John Thompson says.
Archie Wilson, channel director at Veritas, agrees 'it's all happening' in storage. Email archiving is particularly hot. But 'very basic backup', he says, is still a goer mainly because so many companies, especially smaller Australian companies and even mid-market players, still have not got a coherent, workable backup and recovery strategy. 'Some of our larger enterprise partners are moving very aggressively into the mid-market,' Wilson adds.
'And we're going to see a lot more focus on the SMB. 'Creative incentives, training and certification are key to helping partners, because no-one - not even the vendors - can be expected to know all about every technology. 'Today, it's just too broad,' Wilson says.
You cannot, however, get nasty if partners are selling rival vendors. You have to be pragmatic and that is just counter-productive, he says. 'We do put our efforts behind partners who lead with our products. But if it's a CA shop, of course they're going to sell them CA,' Wilson says. Keep an eye out for NetApp, too, with its good channel relations and focus. 'They're definitely a company on the move,' Wilson says.
Chris Bennett, senior director of product management at NetApp, says NetApp is arming itself by acquiring virtual tape library software developer Alacritus and focusing R&D on storage virtualisation and information life cycle management. For instance, NetApp recently introduced its V-series appliances, which allow the virtualisation of both block and file data in a single device, and has demonstrated what it called the first-ever third-party virtualisation of EMC storage.
HDS, meanwhile, unveiled additions to its software to allow movement of block-level data across multiple storage tiers with no disruption in operation, says Jack Domme, vice-president of storage management software. By the end of 2005, that movement would be automated by customer policy, Domme says. Next is to migrate data across multiple tiers on a file-by-file basis, no mean feat when there are hundreds of TB to move, he says.
For its part, Sun has enhanced its StorEdge 6920 array with synchronous and asynchronous data replication, the creation of up to three mirrored copies of data, and the ability to connect HP and EMC storage arrays behind it into a virtual storage pool. And it is investing in a storage clustering project that uses meta-data to help search large pools of data.
CA is pushing against Veritas and EMC by integrating system management, data backup and security into a single Total Protection Suite for the SMB and enterprise space, says Jim Geronaitis, vice-president of product marketing at the company.
StorageTek, one of the first vendors to introduce a 4Gb/s Fibre Channel array, wants to double the number of US strategic reseller partners to about 40 this year and plans to offer more robust professional services offerings and certification classes, says George Karabatsos, vice-president of reseller sales and marketing.
As vendors unleash more storage products and programs, the balance has shifted. The force is with resellers - not vendors.
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