EMC announces high-end array, IP storage products

EMC Thursday announced several new storage arrays and software for customers with IP networks and the largest storage needs.

At an event in London, the company rolled out a new version of the DMX-3. The DMX-3 is an array that has as many as 2,400 drives, each with a capacity of as much as 500G bytes. The drives operate between 7,200 and 15,000 RPM. The new DMX-3 will also be the first of EMC's arrays to use 500G-byte 7,200-RPM low-cost Fibre Channel drives. Low-cost, slower Fibre Channel drives are suitable for storing less business-critical data.

"It would make sense to start backfilling, as EMC announced DMX-3 at the ultra-high end to effectively fence it off and above their current lineup," says Greg Schulz, senior analyst for StorageIO. "It would make perfect sense at some point to start refreshing the rest of the product line when sales warrant it."

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EMC Thursday announced several new storage arrays and software for customers with IP networks and the largest storage needs.

At an event in London, the company rolled out a new version of the DMX-3. The DMX-3 is an array that has as many as 2,400 drives, each with a capacity of as much as 500G bytes. The drives operate between 7,200 and 15,000 RPM. The new DMX-3 will also be the first of EMC's arrays to use 500G-byte 7,200-RPM low-cost Fibre Channel drives. Low-cost, slower Fibre Channel drives are suitable for storing less business-critical data.

"It would make sense to start backfilling, as EMC announced DMX-3 at the ultra-high end to effectively fence it off and above their current lineup," says Greg Schulz, senior analyst for StorageIO. "It would make perfect sense at some point to start refreshing the rest of the product line when sales warrant it."

The company also announced a new low-end DMX-3 with 96 disk drives. Like the high-end version, this array can use 15,000 RPM 146 G-byte, 10,000 RPM 300 G-byte or 7,200 RPM 500 G-byte drives.

DMX sales accounted for one-third of all Symmetrix sales in the fourth quarter, EMC reported. EMC said the average system ships with 60T bytes.

The new DMX is expected to fit well into EMC's information lifecycle management strategy, which calls for the placement of data on storage with the appropriate price and performance. A DMX system with Fibre Channel and low-cost Fibre Channel drives can sit alongside EMC's content-addressable Centera array and a tape library, providing for four tiers of storage.

The company also announced a new technology for IP connectivity called the Multipath File System for iSCSI (MPFSI). MPFSI uses standard network-attached storage with the low-overhead iSCSI protocol to send large blocks of data over the IP network, thus improving performance.

EMC also announced that its Rainfinity Global File Virtualization now includes global namespace management and synchronous IP replication capability, which provide customers with improved management and protection capabilities for their file-based information.