Ask any senior IT executive in a large enterprise to describe their "storage strategy" and you probably won't hear about their fabric architecture or storage management software--and you certainly won't hear about their information lifecycle management strategy. The IT brass will most likely want to talk about the tier-one storage array they deploy. In the rarefied air of multihundred terabyte or multipetabyte tier-one production environments, the storage array is the anchor for storage decision-making. With just four words, "We're a DMX shop" or "We're a USP shop," a storage architect telegraphs a wealth of information about their entire storage strategy.

These top-of-the-line multipetabyte behemoths are much more than mere physical storage devices. In a very real sense, the EMC Corp. Symmetrix DMX-3 and the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Corp. TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) 1100 are bellwethers for what the storage industry will deliver in coming years, with each platform showcasing not only the most advanced capabilities of EMC and HDS, but their philosophy about how IT teams should deploy, manage, grow and protect their infrastructures. EMC and HDS are locked in a fierce battle for control of the data center that could shape the broader enterprise IT infrastructure for years to come.