Off To EMC WorldOff To EMC World

I'm joining several editors at EMC World, the storage giant's annual user conference, to get interviews with executives and find out what EMC has in store for the future.I'm particularly interested to hear what EMC has on tap with file virtualization. This technology makes discrete storage resources appear as a single pool to clients and applications, and simplifies data migration.

The company's Rainfinity product competes head to head with F5's Acopia. Brocade also plays in this market. It's still a young space: the Taneja Group estimates annual revenue for the entire market is just $100 million. But its got potential to be much bigger.

I'm also curious to hear EMC's take on several startups in the storage space. For instance, RevStor makes use of existing disk space on PCs and servers on the network. It chops unstructured data files such as Word documents into smaller chunks and distributes them across a variety of other machines on the network.

Another startup, Cleversafe, is tackling the replication market. Instead of making duplicate copies of an entire file, Cleversafe slices the file into multiple pieces and stores those pieces on storage systems in different physical locations. The company claims its algorithms can reconstruct an entire file even if it loses some of those pieces.

The upshot? Instead of multiple backup copies of a single file, which means more disk and higher cost, you make a single distributed copy and save money.

Of course, both of these companies are young and untested, but they are bringing interesting ideas to the table. We'll see what EMC has to say.