IBM and EMC: it's handbags at dawn

Big Blue claims EMC's latest Network Attached Storage (NAS) offering, titled Celerra, is "unworkable".

IBM claims EMC's NAS software, which was unveiled last week, will not work with any other storage products on the market nor will it win the company any customers.

Roger Messenger, NAS product manager at IBM said: "The new NAS functions in Celerra are only available when coupled to EMC's Symmetrix storage hardware system, it doesn't support any other vendor's storage."

He added: "EMC has realised they have been falling behind the market and needed to catch up. But they are not going to gain any further market share by bringing in closed systems that won't work with other vendors' products."

Messenger said EMC will have difficulties in developing open platform products in the future.
He told silicon.com: "Once you start off with your own written operating system you have great difficulty branching out without any major investment. This is not going be good news to any prospective customers."

IBM said EMC is not interested in helping its customers with their NAS/SAN integration, but is only interested in selling software which works on its own platforms to its customers:

"EMC claims to ease NAS/SAN integration, but they are only doing it for Celerra and Symmetrix," he said.

Last October, EMC made the radical decision to develop storage software for rivals' hardware such as IBM's and Hitachi's.

But EMC has been subjected to much criticism from rival vendors who claim it has not made any strides towards interoperability.

EMC has had an unfortunate past few months. Following disastrous third quarter results late last year, the company had to lay off thousands of workers.

It has also been rumoured to be the subject of a takeover bid as well as suffering from a series of boardroom reshuffles.

EMC was unavailable for comment.