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EMC Corp. is blending virtual file system and storage management software via the EMC Celerra NSX NAS gateway in an effort to ease enterprise data center scalability and performance woes.
Announced last week, the EMC Celerra NSX network-attached storage gateway will eventually succeed the slower-paced Celerra Clustered Network Server, provides up to 300,000 NFS (Network File System) operations per second and supports up to 16TB of file size capacity per X-Blade server; its available next month for $278,250, said officials of EMC, based in Hopkinton, Mass.
The NSX NAS gateway sits in front of a SAN (storage area network) and enables users to boost storage performance thresholds through online upgrades that allow as many as eight X-Blades, previously called Celerra Data Movers, to run on the server.
EMC has significantly upgraded its Celerra software with scalable management features around predictive monitoring to determine when a file system or file server is full based on historical data and patterns to simplify storage reallocation.
NAS iSCSI management and connectivity have been boosted via a new configuration wizard to ease provisioning, as well as integration with Microsoft Corp.s Windows 2003 Volume Shadow Copy Services, officials said.
For Unix and Windows users, EMCs Nested Mount FileSystem technology allows multiple Celerra file systems to be rolled up into a single virtual file system.
EMC also unveiled its new EMC Centera FileArchiver. A plug-on to NSX, the software integrates with the Celerra FileMover API to migrate data off a Celerra platform onto a Centera box based on policies.
An early user of EMCs NSX gateway, Mack Kigada, system engineer on the data storage team for Seattle-based Providence Health System, said the boxs Nested Mount FileSystem will be a major boon to help administrate storage capacity and usage without being forced to open up an entire tree.
“That, to me, is fantastic because usually we design file shares by facility or hospitals. If you can nest file systems, you get much greater granular control,” said Kigada.