EMC Corp. will announce new hardware and software options for its flagship Symmetrix DMX family next week.
The core of the news will be mainframe support, which officials of the Hopkinton, Mass., storage giant previously said would come this summer.
Ficon, or Fibre Connection, is the popular method of attaching storage systems to mainframes. Because of an unspecified delay, EMC didnt have the option ready for the original DMX family launch, so the company upgraded the prior Symmetrix 8000 model for customers who needed the option immediately.
Now, Ficon exists for DMX, in a model called DMX3000, sources close to EMC confirmed. Also, it will have 73.5TB of usable capacity; the older 8000 series had roughly 70TB as well, but that was only raw capacity.
There is also a new entry-level configuration option for the DMX800, at just 7.6TB, and a new channel director card with built-in Ficon, Gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI, the sources said.
In software, there is a new option for EMCs Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), called SRDF/A, that conducts high-performance asynchronous data movement, sources said. In addition, new software called EMC Snap, a pointer-based snapshot utility, is positioned as a capacity-saving alternative to EMCs TimeFinder mirroring application, they said. EMC Snap attempts to solve the performance sacrifice of many snapshot programs by residing in memory, they said.
EMC officials did not comment.