EMC, with the help of software from the Belgian company FilePool that they acquired the previous year, sought to apply an indexing scheme to the data. Content addressing would help you track bits as they migrated across frames.

It might have been a good plan, if Hopkinton had not decided to join the FilePool content addressable storage (CAS) software to a hardware controller on a low-end EMC array. Doing so created one of the biggest lock-in strategies seen in the industry. Having encoded your data into a Centera array, you could only buy storage for additional indexed storage going forward from Hopkinton. If you were in neo-natal health care and had to hold on to data for as long as the patient walked the earth, you were basically tied to EMC for the next 70 or 80 years.

Fear of vendor lock-in is one of the main reasons I'm in favour of Open Source in general - I'm a lot less likely to get locked into a particular vendors product, only to find that it's nigh impossible to extract my data further down the track. (Not that I'm a zealot about these things, I'm a realist - I use open source where it's good enough to do what I need, proprietary everywhere else).

EMC's Centera kit is a classic example of vendor lock-in, not just in software, but hardware as well (as the linked article goes to some lengths to explain), so it's good to see someone (Paul Carpentier, the guy who invented Content Addressed Storage in the first place) has started up a company called Caringo, which is coming out with a software only and hardware agnostic CAS solution called CAStor (I hope they have a ghost logo, I hope they have a ghost logo).

"I have a suspicion that the fur will fly once Carpentier begins enumerating the flaws with Centera, a topic which he can address with absolute unassailability as the father of CAS. Moreover, he knows exactly where the bodies are buried in the EMC wares, and taking him on would not be a good idea. It should make for some entertaining diversions during the Summer of 2006."

This sounds like being a space to watch...