EMC Corp. is again ready to do battle with the likes of Compaq Computer Corp., IBM Corp.
and Hitachi Data
Systems Inc. , as the firm Wednesday unveiled new network attached storage (NAS) hardware, software and service offerings
for its Celerra File Server.
The Hopkinton, Mass. concern claims the new offerings meet the needs of firms who desire to make NAS a part of their core
businesses. EMC said that in addition to boosting capacity, performance and connectivity of NAS products, the additions offer NAS/SAN (Storage Area Network) integration. NAS devices, such as the Celerra File Server, allow more hard disk storage space to be
added to a network that already utilizes servers without shutting them down for maintenance and upgrades. With a NAS device, storage
is not an integral part of the server. Instead, the server still handles all of the processing of data but a NAS device delivers the
data to the user.
Chief among the slew of products is EMC’s Celerra Data Mover 510, which acts as a cluster of up to 14 dedicated file servers within
Celerra. This consists of dual-processor design to double the breadth and performance of the earlier versions of Celerra. What does
this mean for a business? Celerra can now scale up to 52 terabytes (TB) of attached storage, deliver 200,000 operations per second
and support up to 224 direct network connections.
As for new software, the firm unloaded new Celerra HighRoad Enhancements, which offers local file system replication through EMC’s
TimeFinder software, Fail Safe networking to protect against IP network failures and virtual LAN support. Celerra also
now offers native support for Microsoft Windows 2000, where previously it just supported Windows NT.
In the services department, EMC introduced Celerra Data Migration Service (CDMS), which will help businesses consolidate storage
mass.
David Donatelli, EMC executive vice president of platforms, said the key driver of the new products is the notion that customers
using NAS are hungry to scale — so much so that they are pushing their infrastructures “to a level that demands a higher order of
NAS capability.”
In fact, EMC is so convinced of the importance of improving NAS offerings, that it opened the EMC NAS Competency Center in
Southborough, Mass. Wednesday. The facility will help customers design and document environments for their NAS applications.
What does the market think of NAS? IDC anticipates the NAS market to grow from $1.89 billion in 2001 to nearly $6 billion by 2005.
IDC forecasts overall external networked storage market revenues to grow from $8.5 billion in 2001 to $19.6 billion in 2005.
EMC’s new products are available now, except for the Celerra Concurrent Copy Backup, which will be available in the second quarter
of 2002.
EMC Makes NAS Push
