EMC’s High-End Storage Boost Saves Dollars

EMC today boosted the performance and capacity of its high-end storage server to go with advancements in storage virtualization.

Company officials released its most powerful Symmetrix DMX-3 storage server, which can power up to 2,400 drives and scale to more than one petabyte of capacity.

At a launch in London, EMC said the DMX-3 will help customers scale the performance and capacity of a single array from 7 terabytes, using 96 disk drives, to more than a petabyte with 2,400 disk drives.

The company is offering the DMX-3 with 500GB, low-cost, Fibre-channel drives to let customers use cost-effective storage for less important files. This enables more application information to be stored on a single array.

The DMX-3 was unveiled last July with a promise to exceed 2,000 drives before the end of 2006.

Ken Steinhardt, director of technology analysis at EMC, said today’s launch puts the Hopkinton, Mass., company ahead of schedule.

With low-cost drives, systems like the DMX-3 are designed to accommodate several tiers of storage in one big machine, which means it treats frequently and rarely accessed files according to their importance.

Previously, such disparate storage had to be housed in different devices. The ability to put files with different access priorities into the same box can be a cost and maintenance saver for businesses.

“We’re redefining tiered storage,” Steinhardt said.

The new Symmetrix DMX-3 storage system configurations will begin shipping in March, and will include support for native Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and IBM’s iSeries midrange server.

EMC also unveiled new virtualization software to round out its portfolio.

The information systems vendor introduced new Multi-Path File System for iSCSI (MPFSi), file system software for EMC’s Celerra network-attached storage machines. Steinhardt said MPFSi delivers pipe grid computing and rich media files over IP networks faster than ever before.

Also, new virtual provisioning capabilities in Celerra allow file systems and iSCSI LUNs to be sized to required capacities and provisioned with less capacity. This reduces storage capacity that may be over-allocated.

EMC also gave its Rainfinity Global File Virtualization platform a boost, with global namespace management and synchronous IP replication.

This software offers customers a unified view of all files and file systems located on different file servers on an IP network.

EMC also improved its Centera content addressed storage (CAS) system, adding new event-based retention and litigation hold software features that give customers more control over their archived information for regulatory and legal purposes.

The new software is designed to help corporations manage their growing glut of data and meet requirements in areas like governance and protection, which have become more stringent in the wake of accounting scandals.