EMC Thursday announced its largest high-end array yet, offering hardware with a scalability range that allows it to be used in mid-sized shops as well as the largest enterprises. The DMX-3 array also sports three different types of Fibre Channel drives that allow users to move storage across tiers of disks inside the array.
Along with DMX-3 storage array announcement, EMC also released an upgrade to its Celerra NAS engine that produces up to four times the performance of previous models along with new iSCSI capabilities that allow remote replication of data over IP.
Dave Donatelli, executive vice president of storage platform operations at EMC, said during a news conference this morning that the DMX-3 array can scale up from 96 to 2,400 drives in a single frame for up to 1 petabyte (PB) of capacity. “You can grow this online without any disruption to your applications,” he said.
The array offers up to three types of Fibre Channel drives: a 500GB lower-cost drive that runs at 7,200 RPMs; a 300GB midrange drive that runs at 10,000 RPM; and a 146GB high-end drive that runs at 15,000 RPM.
The three sets of drives can be run simultaneously within a single frame and data can be automatically moved across them using policies based on the age and criticality of the data, according to Ken Steinhardt, director of technology analysis at EMC.
Retail pricing for a DMX-3 with 96 drives and 7TB capacity starts at US$250,000.
EMC also announced it has integrated software from an earlier acquisition that will allow the consolidation of network attached storage (NAS) systems by using a single global name space. EMC said its RainStorage software virtualizes Windows, Unix and Linux file systems across heterogeneous NAS systems and file servers, making individual boxes appear to be a single unit to a host server. Data can also be moved between physical NAS servers without disrupting business applications.
The RainStorage software comes from EMC’s August acquisition of Rainfinity Inc.
“People say they like their first file server, and the first half dozen or so…, but when they went beyond that, they didn’t like it so much anymore,” Donatelli said.
The upgrade to EMCs Celerra NAS system also allows users to take advantage of so called “thin provisioning” technology, which allows administrators to automate the provisioning of storage to applications, he said.
Using traditional storage provisioning methods, IT managers had to purchase additional capacity up front and over allocate storage to ensure applications wouldn’t suffer from storage limitations. With thin provisioning, applications are only given the disk space they need to store data. The array maintains a buffer of spare disk space and either automatically provisions or alerts systems administrators to allocate more when that buffer starts to run out.
EMC also announced its Multi-Path File System for iSCSI (MPFSi), file-sharing software that boosts the performance of NAS networks by up to four times over earlier system capabilities. MPFSi works by allowing NAS user requests to come in over a standard file systems protocol (CIFS or NFS), but the data is then served to the host using the Internet SCSI (iSCSI) protocol.
The MPFSi software also allows data to be replicated asynchronously across a WAN using the iSCSI protocol.
iSCSI is a block-based protocol that allows for far greater data transfer rates.
“This allows large objects [files] for things like grid computing or software development to be served up much faster,” Steinhardt said.
