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At a media and analyst event in London Thursday, EMC unveiled a number of new storage and virtualization products designed to enhance information lifecycle management capabilities across its tiered storage, data mobility and data protection lines of business.
Underscoring the old adage that size does matter, EMC announced the availability of its new EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 storage system, which can scale up to more than 1 petabyte, or 1,024 terabytes.
The record capacity is enabled in the high-end array through qualification of Symmetrix DMX-3 system configurations supporting up to 2,400 disk drives and the addition of new 500GB Fibre Channel disk drives.
“Once you get an array that size, by combining larger size with lower-cost drives, [customers] can use that functionality in ways they never could before,” said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president of Storage Platforms Operations with Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC. “Now you can put [it toward] tier three applications, recovery, things you would never consider for high-end storage before.”
Broadening the appeal of Symmetrix to a new audience, EMC announced an entry-level Symmetrix DMX-3 system configuration allowing customers to scale the capacity of a single array from 7TB—via 96 disk drives—to more than 1 petabyte with 2,400 disk drives, said Donatelli.
To enable IP (Internet Protocol) storage to handle new classes of enterprise applications, EMC introduced EMC Multi-Path File System for iSCSI file-sharing software. MPFSi combines standard NAS (network-attached storage) with the iSCSI protocol to deliver large blocks of data over the IP network.
Staying on course with iSCSI, EMC announced its new EMC Celerra Replicator for ISCSI. The initial release of the product can scale to more than 1,000 iSCSI LUNs (logical unit numbers). The software drastically improves thin provisioning and bandwidth consumption by only sending changed data during remote backups.
When EMC acquired network file migration vendor Rainfinity last August, the move was seen as a way for EMC to bolster its virtualization portfolio. On Thursday, EMC announced a new release of EMC Rainfinity Global File Virtualization that will include Global Namespace Management and Synchronous IP Replication. The two new features are designed to improve the management and administration of NAS environments, noted Donatelli.
For its Centera content-addressed storage line, EMC rolled out new retention management software capabilities to help solve regulatory and IT governance issues within the enterprise by wrapping archival methodology around new ILM features. For instance, the new product enables authorized administrators to pinpoint and extend retention periods for specific records or objects within the Centera archive. New Event-based Retention and Litigation Hold features allow customers to more easily deal with complex scenarios.