ATA and Fibre Channel disk drives announced
ATA and Fibre Channel disk drives announced
At Germany's CeBIT exhibition in Hanover, EMC has announced the first storage system to include integrated ATA and Fibre Channel disk drives.
ATA drives have been integrated into EMC's CLARiiON network storage system. At the announcement, EMC continued to stoke up the cost-per-megabyte debate by claiming that this device will enable companies to bring their data online and take it off tape-based systems. In a statement, EMC said; "Until now, the economics of disk storage forced customers to store a majority of data offline - resulting in substantially lower service levels for most of their information assets. With this announcement, EMC has incorporated ATA technology into the CLARiiON architecture to bring more information into online SAN and NAS environments, thus dramatically increasing service levels through improved availability and functionality."
EMC admits that the list price for the new CLARiiON is higher than tape, but it claims that the ATA based CLARiiON "offers significantly higher performance and reliability", adding that it can carry out a back up in a claimed third less time and restore in 80 per cent less time "than tape in typical environments."
"All information wants to live online," said David Donatelli, the EMC executive vice president of storage platforms operations at the German launch. Adding; "Once online, information then can deliver far greater value back to the business through higher service levels."
A number of software suppliers to EMC have also used the announcement to reveal that their applications have been modified for the ATA based CLARiiON system. Applications configured for ATA include CommVault's Galaxy, Computer Associates BrightStor ARCserve Backup and BrightStor Enterprise Backup, Legato's Networker, EmailXtender and Veritas' NetBackup and Backup Exec, all of these have been tested and are available for the system.
EMC's own Data Manager application has also been configured to support backup to disk functions.
CLARiiON with ATA will be available immediately, the CX600 and CX400 systems 250GB, 54000 RPM ATA drives. At present only US prices are available, with a list pricing for the 10 terabyte system costing US$170,000.
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