EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) has stopped promoting its WideSky middleware program in favor of adopting industry standards to manage multivendor SANs, the company's top software executive said this week.
EMC introduced WideSky in October 2001 as software that "masks the underlying complexity of multiple vendors' products." The move prompted waves of concern [ed. note: or nausea] among competitors and some customers that EMC was scheming to grab more control of the storage using a proprietary software stack (see Users Frosty on EMC WideSky, Standards Clique Freezes Out EMC, and The Common Code).
But now, WideSky -- at least as a marketing program -- appears to be dead.
Mark Lewis, EVP of open software operations, said in an interview with Byte and Switch at the company's analyst day meeting in New York that the company has aligned its strategy for supporting third-party storage systems and devices with Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)'s Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S).
"We're not discussing that [WideSky] because we said we'd open up, and use standards and API swaps," Lewis said. "SMI is our external strategy." At this point, he said, WideSky is simply "internal middleware" that EMC's own developers are using.
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