The two companies have extended their existing cooperative support agreement to include a broader range of servers, storage, and software products, designed to help their joint customers resolve problems faster.
"I think customers will see an immediate benefit in working around support issues," says Roland Hagan, VP of storage marketing for IBM.
In addition, EMC has licensed interfaces for IBM's Enterprise Storage Server (ESS), also known as Shark; this is intended to let EMC support IBM's Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (PPRC), Extended Remote Copy (XRC), FlashCopy, Multiple Allegiance, and Parallel Access Volumes (PAV) features on EMC Symmetrix systems. Financial terms of this part of the deal were not disclosed.
The EMC/IBM agreement is the last one of its kind among the major storage industry vendors, EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) having each struck similar interoperability agreements with each other (see EMC and Hitachi Bury Hatchet, HP Makes API Triple Play, HP, Hitachi Trade APIs, EMC, HP Catch Each Other's Codes, HDS: EMC Scuttled API Swap, and Standards Clique Freezes Out EMC).
One sticking point between IBM and EMC was -- undoubtedly -- EMC's unwillingness to pull back on WideSky, its proprietary middleware that was supposed to provide interoperability among multivendor storage networks.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
