EMC has introduced a new high-end Symmetrix DMX-4 storage system, as well as enhancements to its mid-range Clariion array, Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) box and content-addressable Centera storage system. Higher-capacity drives being added to most of its systems can be expected to consume 25% less power, according to EMC’s estimates. The company is also adding security and availability features.
“A lot of the new features are related to power and cooling,” says Stephanie Balouras, senior analyst with Forrester Research. “EMC is laying the foundation for a pretty strong campaign on green IT and how they can gain efficiencies in the datacentre.”
Another analyst sees the EMC initiatives paying competitive dividends.
“EMC is refreshing, enhancing and increasing both the scale up/scale down and scale out capabilities of their systems,” says Greg Schulz, senior analyst for StorageIO. “They are going pretty comprehensive compared to some other vendors’ recent product announcements.”
The company last introduced new Symmetrix gear 17 months ago that had 500GB drives for a storage capacity of more than a petabyte. Hitachi, by contrast, last upgraded its Universal Storage Platform in May, a year after it upgraded its performance and added availability enhancements. HP announced in June green features for its Enterprise Virtual Array such as low-cost and slower Fibre ATA drives.
EMC announced a new DMX-4 array that has end-to-end 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel connectivity. The new DMX-4 will also allow customers to intermix Fibre Channel and Serial ATA drives, and use increased-capacity 750GB drives that will lower power consumption by as much as 25%.
The EMC Clariion line of mid-range storage arrays will also see performance enhancements. In addition, the Clariion drives will now support RAID 6, which is sometimes called double parity. In RAID 6, if two disk drives fail within a single RAID group, data can be rebuilt.
As for the Celerra NAS array, the capability to add block-level, storage-area networking support will be added without the need for a separate NAS gateway.
Finally, the EMC Centera will include the use of 750GB drives and be backward-compatible.
Centera will also feature drives that consume 25% less power.