There are three stages to SNW. Firstly, there is the event itself replete with all the networking (people as well as fibre channel), keynotes, sessions, demos, and late nights. The second stage is reading through all that is written about SNW: who said what, what was announced, and other press releases (“what my CEO really meant to say was…”). That is the stage we’re in right now. The third stage is, of course, getting ready for the next SNW.

So, back to stage two and the media and analyst coverage. Bob Schultz (GM of HP StorageWorks) took some jabs at EMC as did Andy Monshaw (IBM’s storage GM) by saying EMC did not yet have a virtualization product. In fact, it was a year ago that InVista was announced to great fanfare in New Orleans. (Well, actually, in May of 2002, EMC announced they would have a virtualization product on the market by 1H2003 but we’ll just chalk that up to a slight product slip). But a year after the formal announcement, InVista has failed to materialize in the market place. Even Byte&Switch questioned the progress in an article called Invisible InVista. I know EMC claims it is shipping the product, but sightings are pretty rare and don’t think a lot of people aren’t looking. I think Monshaw called it “chartware”.

Where does this leave EMC in the virtualization race? Virtualization is no longer on the “hype curve”, it is shipping, and it is being adopted quite well if our own experience is any indication. IBM claims SVC to be a success also. I’m sure InVista will ship some day, and the storage world is waiting to see when, and what features it will contain.

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