Together, the two companies promise to bring a top-to-bottom storage solution to end users, including backup and recovery, core operating system-level storage, storage resource management and high availability.
For example, the product now has "extended retention time," allowing data to be automatically stored for more than 82 years. A third virtualisation product, the SAN File System, will be made available later this year, according to IBM.
EMC has been working hard to broaden its reputation as a viable provider of storage software, most recently by agreeing to purchase Legato Systems, a maker of backup and recovery software, in a $1.3bn deal.
EMC has been developing its software business as part of its focus on ILM, agreeing in July to acquire Legato Systems, a maker of backup and recovery systems, in a stock deal worth $1.3bn. Joe Tucci, EMC's chief executive, said during a conference...
Another impetus for storage software purchases is organisations' need to comply with new rules related to data retention, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, said Bill North, an analyst at IDC. The storage resource management market benefited from...
Ciena's Smith echoed this need for "IT directors, as well as executive management, to be educated about data retention" to steer their businesses through the common pitfalls of either doing too much or too little.