Storage competitors EMC Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. Wednesday are expected to announce that they will exchange technologies to let their products interoperate and manage each other.
The companies will share APIs for a variety of storage products, including EMC’s Symmetrix and Clariion arrays, and HP’s XP and Enterprise Virtual Arrays. While the deal is a follow-on to an exchange of APIs between EMC and Compaq, it adds API support for HP’s Virtual Array and the portions of the software that HP adds to the XP family of arrays.
HP is expected to use EMC APIs in its Open SAN Manager, Enterprise Volume Manager, SecurePath, OpenView Storage Area Manager and Data Replication Manager products, among others.
EMC will use HP APIs in its EMC Control Center family, including ECC SAN Manager, StorageScope and PowerPath, as well as its WideSky middleware.
The exchange of APIs will allow storage software from the two companies to autodiscover attached storage systems and gather information on their configurations and performance. It will also allow them to perform remote snapshots and clone disk volumes for availability and fault-tolerance, create and configure partitions and build topology maps.
The companies will also sign a cooperative support agreement that will allow users with mixed EMC and HP storage environments to be able to count on either company for support.
Both companies remain committed to the Bluefin specification, which provides management in line with Web-based Enterprise Management and the Common Information Model.
According to company claims, this agreement affects 50 percent of the direct-attached storage market and 70 percent of the storage-area network market.