A New Frontier In Storing Data

"Literally, you can be an idiot and use this thing," Tucci says. "The marching orders around this product were to just make it simpler and simpler to use. It has some great technology that we'll take into our bigger systems over time."

Tucci isn't discussing the DMX Symmetrix product, nor is he referring to the Clariion midrange product set. He is talking about Centera, a storage device that EMC introduced in April 2002 and, by all accounts, is taking off like a rocket. Just take a look at some of the numbers surrounding Centera: EMC's Centera fourth-quarter 2002 revenue increased 258 percent compared with the previous quarter. The sales force has sold more than a petabyte of Content Addressed Storage (CAS), most of it during the fourth quarter,which actually was only the second full quarter Centera was on the market.

Network Engines was contracted to help EMC develop Centera. The company currently assembles and tests the Centera hardware at a facility in Canton, Mass. Hit particularly hard by the dot-com fallout, Network Engines now credits 85 percent of its 2002 revenues to the Centera deal, citing a 250 percent revenue growth from fourth quarter 2002 over the previous quarter, according to the company's earnings records.

"You gotta love it, right?" says Roy Sanford, EMC's vice president of CAS. It's hard not to at least like it, especially with those numbers. EMC sees Centera as more of an enterprise play, with some midmarket opportunity as well. Consider that the minimum configuration is 5 TBs. But what is even more interesting is that Centera is a solid example of a company taking technology that's acquired and using it to solve a business problem. About three years ago, Sanford says, the company noticed customers were dealing with several types of data: transactional, collaborative and unstructured information. The first two already had solutions on the market, with storage-area networks handling transactional data and network-attached storage dealing with collaborative information. Something was needed to handle unstructured data,rich media in the video space or reference data, such as check images in banking.

So EMC took the software acquired from the purchase of File Pool, a Belgium-based company that originally operated as an Internet file-sharing service, and created Centera, a device that could manage data at an object level, rather than a block or file level. Internally, Centera does not use SCSI or Fibre Channel. Instead, it's a redundant array of independent nodes clustered and networked into a cabinet, using a standard TCP/IP protocol.

Centera treats the document as a binary large object. It creates a digital fingerprint of the object's data and stores it in the network storage like a claim check. All the application needs to do to recover the data is to send this claim check back to Centera, Sanford says. Centera will search its repository, find the object in a subsecond of time, and return it to the application.

As far as Sanford knows, this is the first time a digital fingerprint is being used as a storage-location reference. "I believe that content-addressing was used in memory many, many years ago in the mainframe environment," he says. "It was never used in storage. In fact, it is unique in the industry."

So far, according to EMC executives, Centera customers include financial institutions and the Los Angeles County Crime Lab. Other key markets include medical imaging, companies that deal with document management and insurance companies. The company has roughly 100 partners working on writing applications to Centera's APIs. A critical part of the go-to-market strategy is to work with partners, Sanford says. "We are actually giving away the API," he says.