EMC smarts to trickle down to consumers

EMC plans to hand down advanced features, including de-duplication and even virtualization, to consumer products coming out of its recently purchased Iomega division.

The Hopkinton, Massachusetts, company is best known for its large-scale enterprise storage systems, but it's expanded into several adjacent markets through acquisitions. On Wednesday, executives from some of those divisions discussed their missions with press and analysts at EMC's Santa Clara, California, office.

Iomega was an early star in direct-attached storage for consumers' PCs and is now shifting its focus toward networked storage for homes and small businesses. EMC bought the company for about US$213 million earlier this year. Many of the features in the parent company's software have a place in the lower-end market, according to Jonathan Huberman, formerly CEO of Iomega and now president of EMC's consumer and small business products division.

EMC has high hopes for the division, aiming for $1 billion of revenue per year, partly because the amount of data to be stored is growing fastest among consumers, Huberman said. Iomega will compete with rivals such as SanDisk and Western Digital on the strength of added features EMC developed for enterprises, he said.

For example, data de-duplication from EMC's Avamar acquisition will be included in an upcoming network-attached storage box from Iomega, Huberman said. That technology recognizes duplicate copies of information and reduces them to one copy, potentially slashing the total amount of space a user requires.

Also on the way is virtualization, an enterprise strength that EMC acquired with VMware. That could be used to make content that is spread across multiple networked hard drives in a home appear as a single pool, so a consumer could find videos or photos without having to know which drive they reside on.

Analyst Charles King of Pund-IT believes both of those would appeal to a fairly small group of consumers because of their complexity.

"I don't see the vast majority of consumers sitting down and playing with virtualization in their home storage arrays," King said. "The only way it could play in the consumer space would be ... if it could be deployed in some very highly automated way that would almost run in the background of a device."

Likewise, most consumers would simply buy more storage, which is falling in price, rather than adopt a separate product for data de-duplication. But if virtually invisible to the user, it might have a benefit, he added. Both technologies would have greater benefits to small businesses, Iomega's other customers, King said.

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