Storage sector leader EMC Corp. unveiled its new line of high-performance Symmetrix storage systems today, touting “hyper-consolidation” as the next wave for enterprises to increase capacity and reduce total cost of information storage.
“Hyper-consolidated enterprise information storage delivers two must-have attributes for customers – increased productivity and lower costs for critical resources,” said Joe Tucci, EMC’s president and CEO.
Today’s announcement includes three new models (all shipping today) in the Symmetrix 8000 enterprise strorage family, the 8830 (described by EMC as “the world’s highest-capacity, highest-density” storage system, with up to 69.5 TB in one cabinet), the 8530, and the 8230 systems.
EMC, of Hopkinton, Mass., is touting a range of technical improvements and enhanced software performance, including increases of up to 50% for open system throughput, 100% for mainframe throughput, 260% in capacity and 500% in connectivity.
“With the new Symmetrix models, EMC continues to be the catalyst for customers’ hyper-consolidation efforts of both mainframe and open systems environments,” Tucci added. “Information storage systems are quickly replacing servers to provide the processing power, capacity and functionality necessary to get the most value from information. EMC Symmetrix systems started that phenomenon, and continue to accelerate it today.”
The new Symmetrix 8000 models include higher processor speeds (upgraded from 266MHz Power PC to 333MHz Power PC) more processors (increased from a maximum of 32 to a maximum of 80), and total system bandwidth. The processing advances enable the new models to perform up to 61.7 million instructions per second, “six times more than any other information storage system in the industry.”
The major enhancements in the Symmetrix operating environment include a new version of the Enginuity Operating Environment for Symmetrix systems, Enginuity 5568.
Other features include:
- Symmetrix Global Cache Director with CacheStorm Technology, to enhance system performance and throughput, improve responsiveness and manage peak workloads.
- A 12-Port Fibre Channel Director, which offers enhanced open systems connectivity with six times more direct host connections – up to 96 – to a single Symmetrix unit.
- A 4-Port Fibre Channel Director, for customers with a smaller number of servers.
- 181 Gigabyte disk drives.
