EMC Boosts Range Of Offerings For The Enterprise

EMC beefed up its information life-cycle management offerings last week with what it calls the world’s highest-capacity disk array, and unveiled enhancements to its compliance appliance and IP storage products.

Dave Donatelli, executive vice president of storage platform operations at Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, said the new DMX-3 arrays can be configured to more than 1 Petabyte using any combination of up to 2,400 Fibre Channel hard drives. This gives the DMX-3 multiple tiers of storage internally for critical applications, backup and archiving, while simplifying storage management, protection and migration of data between the tiers, Donatelli said.

EMC scaled down the DMX-3 as well. Entry-level configurations start at 96 hard drives vs. the previous minimum of 192 drives, he said.

John Orr, president of Stack Computer, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider, said his company has been testing the new DMX-3 arrays for several months and found them better than expected. Stack is a beta tester for many EMC products and is typically able to throw enough data at an array to eventually saturate it.

“But this time, no matter what we threw at it, we found no more than 20 percent utilization,” Orr said.

The DMX-3 is slated to start shipping in March. Pricing wasn’t released. EMC also improved Centera’s data-retention-management software, ensuring that data can’t be deleted or modified except as permitted by a customer’s compliance policies. The software is shipping now at a list price of $2,800 for a four-node license.

In addition, EMC is looking to bring iSCSI storage into the enterprise with Multi-Path File System for iSCSI, which boosts performance by allowing data to be retrieved from a storage array over an IP network using a different data path from the one used to request the data, Donatelli said.