EMC's Petabyte Disk Array Included in Latest Product Updates

January 27th, 2006: EMC jets into the 2006 with new file system software, enhanced Rainfinity file virtualisation, the world's first one-petabyte storage array, and revamped Centera.

Making some of the most impressive announcements since its foundation in 1979, EMC Corporation beat the competition to the punch in London this week by revealing its Symmetrix DMX-3 system's new ability to take support 2,400, 500Gb Fibre Channel (LC-FC) disk drives. Although, according to EMC's ANZ product manager, Clive Gold: "We won't see a petabyte machine in ANZ for quite some time."

That said, EMC also announced an entry-level, seven-terabyte DMX-3 configuration using 96 drives but scalable up to the 1Pb storage monster.

Not content with delivering configuration upgrades - albeit world-beating ones - the corporation also revealed its Multi-Path File System for iSCSI (MPFSi) file system software. Clive Gold told IDM: "MPFSi enables you to run both your NAS and SAN systems. The system uses the speed of SAN and the sharing abilities of NAS. It basically chooses the most appropriate format to transport your data. "

Not content with delivering configuration upgrades - albeit world-beating ones - the corporation also revealed its IP-based Multi-Path File System for iSCSI (MPFSi) file system software. Clive Gold told IDM: "MPFSi enables you to run both your NAS and SAN systems. The system uses the speed of SAN and the sharing abilities of NAS. It basically chooses the most appropriate format to transport your data." The company has also made the client software available as open source code - see the end of this article for the download location.

Hot on the heels of these two product options comes even more features for the Rainfinity Global File Virtualisation platform. Gold told IDM: "This is file virtualisation of all the NAS in your environment no matter what make, no matter what flavour. You just plug it into your network, that's it. You can even do that while people are still using your current system.

And Content Addressed Storage (CAS) also got a polish with additions announced for the Centera platform. With compliance top of the worry-list for US companies, the new 'advanced retention' software for Centera should prove a hit. According to EMC the upgrades enable: "authorized application users and administrators to easily identify and extend retention periods for specific records or objects in the Centera archive. The new Event-based Retention (EBR) and Litigation Hold features help Centera Governance Edition and Centera Compliance Edition Plus customers deal with more varied and complex scenarios. For example, e-mail messages and documents that are scheduled to be automatically deleted per policy can be easily identified and retained if they are material to legal, regulatory or other events. The record or object can then be deleted when appropriate. "

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