EMC Updates Centera

March 18, 2008: Responding to the exponential increase in data storage requirements, EMC has upgraded its flagship Centera’s archiving capabilities.

The company has doubled the amount of digital objects its EMC Centera content addressed storage (CAS) system can archive, while claming to further ease management and secure unchanging electronic content such as medical images, e-mail records, financial documents, video and audio recordings and more.

Earlier this week the analysts at IDC released an EMC sponsored white paper titled ‘The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2011’. Quite a mouthful, but apt as the amount of digital information is indeed being created at a highly accelerated rate - close to 60 percent annually.

EMC says that thanks to VoIP, sensors, and RFID tags, the number of electronic information “containers” (small files, images, packets, tag contents) is growing 50 percent faster than the number of gigabytes, causing a headache for those charged with managing storage archives.

To address this, the company’s latest Centera operating software, CentraStar 4.0, has doubles the amount of objects that each individual disk drive in a system can hold, with each 500 gigabyte or 750 gigabyte drive now able to gobble up to 25 million objects.

Furthermore, the company says that the new version of the free software upgrade improves the self-management and healing capabilities of Centera systems, making them up to 25 percent faster than previous versions.

“Customer archives are being challenged like never before. Big files are getting bigger and the quantity of small pieces of information is exploding,” said, Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President, EMC Storage Division.

“In the past, customers were worried about storing millions of emails, while today we have customers with a billion emails in their archive. With these latest enhancements, we continue to lead the industry in delivering cost-effective production class archiving solutions that keep up with the challenges that customers are facing today.”

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