LAS VEGAS—Even though it appears to be only a matter of time before world storage market leader EMC officially enters the server market, Joe Tucci will admit to nothing of the sort at this point.
"No, we're not," EMC's triple-threat president, CEO and chairman of the board told eWEEK May 9 when asked that question at a crowded press conference at EMC World 2011 here at the Venetian Hotel.
"We are playing at the server level in many areas, no question about it. But as for building devices for the server market, we have partners that already do a good job at it, so we're not going there."
Even so, it sure looks like EMC is edging closer to becoming a player in the server business so it can become a full-service systems provider. EMC still needs to provide servers and networking—namely, a router of some kind—to earn that level of distinction.
Tucci was answering questions in response to the company's announcement that it will launch a new PCIe/NAND flash-based serverlike device, code-named Project Lightning, next fall.
With a PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) card that slides into a slot within a server to do a specific job—in this case, moving virtual machines and their workloads around—EMC will be jumping into a new tank of sharks named IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Oracle and Cisco Systems. Of course, EMC has been competing with all those companies and many more in the storage, data protection and virtualization software sectors for most of the past decade, so this is nothing new.
The whole idea is for the data and its processing node in a virtualized system to be as close together as possible for efficiency reasons. Lightning is designed to provide this agility.
For more, read the eWEEK article: EMC Unveils All-Flash PCIe Serverlike Device.
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