EMC unveils pay-per-use storage
Published: 16 Jul 2003 08:20 BST
Storage giant EMC is set to unveil an on-demand storage programme that charges customers for what they use, marking a shift towards a utility-computing model championed by rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
Under a typical utility-computing plan, computing power is dispensed on a per usage basis, much like electricity or water. The model, which has been strongly promoted by Big Blue and rival Hewlett-Packard (HP), is supposed to benefit customers by bringing down the total cost of ownership, as well as offering the savings of outsourcing IT operations.
Now, EMC is set to get into the game too. In two weeks, the storage specialist will introduce a service called OpenScale that precisely measures and captures how much storage resources are being used, said Tony Marzulli, EMC's vice president of open software marketing.
The information will be translated into a metered storage model where customers will be charged for resources used.
"We've have been doing this for some of our customers for almost a year," he said.
According to details on the firm's Web site, OpenScale will cull storage information from customer data centres though a software module called "Collector" and report the findings back to EMC for billing purposes.
The Collector software application is a web-based performance monitor for EMC's ControlCentre.net products and services. The Collector can gather data from your Storage systems, Unix, Windows, Oracle, and SAP R/3 environments for access by other EMC products and services such as AutoAdvice, OpenScale and SAN (Storage Area Network) Architect, the firm said.
Other storage systems providers like HP, IBM and Hitachi have traditionally offered on-demand storage services that allow customers to turn on incremental blocks of storage when they see a need. However, EMC's OpenScale service -- to be officially unveiled in two weeks -- marks one of the first few attempts to break storage subscription right down to granular details.
Marzuli said that EMC's utility plan will not include outsourced storage, where customers leave storage operations to another company.
Not all customers see the wisdom in letting another company take over its hardware, processes and people, adding that outsourcing is a complex business that has not always lived up to promises, he said.
He also questioned the wisdom of going into the hosted server business, as rival IBM seems to have done.
"EMC's core competency is storage systems, management and services. There are companies like EDS and Accenture that have competency in doing outsourcing. IBM's claim to fame is that they can do it all. It remains to be seen whether they can," he said.
According to previous media reports, HP is rumoured to have an application that also promises metered storage but the company could not provide further details at press time.
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