EMC Corp. launched a series of upgrades Monday across all of its tiered storage platforms, including Symmetrix DMX, CLARiiON CX, Celerra and Centera.
Joe Tucci, EMC’s CEO, said the products are all geared towards improving enterprises’ information lifecycle management, allowing them to reduce overall IT costs, while protecting their existing investments.
“For customers the first step in information lifecycle management is tiered network storage,” he said.
At the high end of EMC’s product line revamp is the Symmetrix DMX-2. The DMX-2 features twice the processing power of the DMX line in its directors and offers 256GB of global memory — twice the capacity of the DMX.
Most users will be content with their existing DMXs, said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president of storage platforms operations. But the DMX-2 will find a home in some large enterprises immediately and gives EMC a roadmap for firms that will have higher storage needs in the future.
EMC’s mid-tier storage platform, the CLARiiON CX series, now includes three more models — the CX300, CX500 and CX700. The CX300 is 25 per cent faster than its predecessor, the CX200. The CX500 is twice as fast as the model it replaces, the CX400, while the CX700 offers a 33 per cent performance boost over the CX600.
Existing CX customers can upgrade to the newer models without throwing out their older storage platforms, Donatelli noted.
In the network-attached-storage market (NAS), EMC introduced new NAS gateway models. NAS gateways allow customers to pool existing SAN and NAS storage resources for better utilization.
The new models include: the Celerra NS700G NAS Gateway; the Celerra NS700 Integrated NAS, a NAS filer that lets customers migrate to a NAS gateway down the road; and the Celerra CNS 514 Data Mover, which delivers 56 per cent better performance than its predecessor, the 510 Data Mover.
For the mainframe environment, EMC rolled out enhancements to the EMC Centera content addressed storage system, which can boost performance by five times and double the data replacation of earlier systems.
By having one large launch for new models in all of its product lines, EMC is trying to simplify the upgrade process for customers, said Allan Freedman, an analyst with IDC Canada Ltd. in Toronto.
“They’re trying to focus on management,” he said. “Not only on management of existing resources, but on management of the planning process in terms of refresh updates and upgrades in capacity and new workloads.”
Refreshing all of its product lines at once also makes sense for EMC, because many of the products use the same drives and components, allowing customers to upgrade from a mid-tier product to a high-end offering without having to throw their old hardware away.
