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EMC on Monday opened its annual EMC World 2012 conference, held this week in Las Vegas, with the introduction of several new storage hardware and software products.
The huge launch, dubbed by EMC as "Mega Launch II," includes over 40 new products, making it easily the largest product launch since EMC's original "Mega Launch" of 40-plus products early last year.
The new product introductions came a day after EMC held its first-ever Global Partner Summit, an event in which the company drew an estimated 3,000 personnel from its worldwide partner base.
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Included in the launch is an expansion of EMC's flagship Symmetrix VMAX storage array line to three models, said Jeremy Burton, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at EMC.
The newest member of the VMAX family, the VMAX 40K, takes a page from rival Hitachi Data Systems' VSP playbook by consolidating EMC and non-EMC storage capacity into a single virtual storage pool via its new Federated Tiered Storage software. The software performs active data integrity checking on data from any back-end arrays to protect against silent data corruption, and it lets customers use Symmetrix SRDF and TimeFinder software for business continuity, FAST VP for improved performance, and other EMC software to manage data across those arrays.
Unlike the HDS VSP, Federated Tiered Storage on the VMAX 40K provides EMC Symmetrix data reliability features to the non-EMC storage, said Brian Gallagher, president of EMC's Enterprise Storage division.
Federated Tiered Storage also includes automated tiered storage capabilities, and works with all applications and databases, Gallagher said. And it is available with no additional per-TB charges. The HDS technology does not provide those features, and there is a per-TB charge over an initial capacity, Gallagher said.
The VMAX 40K features a new hardware controller platform that can be configured with up to 32 2.8-GHz Intel Xeon 6-core processors, up to 2 TBs of mirrored DRAM, and up to 4 petabytes of usable capacity using high-capacity drives or up to 3.2 PBs using 2.5-inch SAS hard drives. The VMAX 40K can also be used with eMLC Flash-based SSDs.
The VMAX family also includes the VMAX 20K, which is equivalent to the existing VMAX array, as well as the VMAX 10K, which replaces the existing entry-level VMAXe.
Also new across the VMAX family is new software, including a new version of EMC's Unisphere with advanced management and a new user interface.
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