Based in Hopkinton, Mass., EMC has seen its market share rise from less than 1 percent in 1990 to a whopping 41 percent last year, beating out IBM for the top spot in the mainframe market. The price and performance of EMC's Symmetrix was better, and some value-added features tipped the scale. Mission-critical data is often no longer located on a single server but distributed over the enterprise. As companies move into the burgeoning open-systems environment, where crucial data may be stored in several different locations, the task of managing data is creating new challenges. Adding to the CIO's level of anxiety is a growing array of storage products from which to choose in formats that include tape, optical disks and traditional hard-disk drives.
Many companies now make products that can plug conveniently into multiple platforms.
And HDS's Hilander family of storage systems offers a central storage backup for entire networks. A company's data can be crucial to its operation, and a failure in its storage system can cripple it, whether it's a bank or a mail-order operation. The ultimate safeguard offered by storage providers is mirror mapping, in which a host maintains duplicate copies of data on separate disks. Unfortunately, this unwieldy duplication forces an enterprise to purchase twice the amount of space it needs. A company could spread a 4GB file across four different disks and maintain a version of the data on a fifth disk using only one additional gigabyte.