Storage:

EMC Drives Up CLARiiON Capacity and Performance

EMC Corporation took another major step in addressing customers' intensified needs for cost-efficient, scalable and high-performance storage. The company introduced new low-cost/high-density and high-performance drive technology for the EMC CLARiiON line of enterprise storage systems to meet the wide and expanding range of storage requirements and applications. Today's announcement includes 181GB 7,200 RPM and 36GB 15,000 RPM disk drives, extending EMC's lead in delivering the investment protection and flexibility required by today's diverse, rapidly changing information storage environments. These two additions to the CLARiiON drive portfolio complement the current 73GB drives -- offering customers the widest choice of capacity and performance.

Joel Schwartz, EMC's senior vice president and General Manager, CLARiiON Systems Division, said, "Many of our customers are seeing their storage requirements climb a steady growth plane -- in contrast to their budgets. They're demanding new high-capacity and high-performance information storage options, while protecting their investment in existing systems. Continuing EMC's rolling infusion of CLARiiON performance enhancements and cost efficiencies, today's announcement takes these CLARiiON traits to a new level."

Radically Slashing the Price/Capacity Ratio

The new 181GB drives more than double the maximum CLARiiON capacity (from 9TB to 22TB) per system and significantly reduce storage acquisition cost. In typical CLARiiON FC4700 configurations, for example, customers can now purchase the same hardware capacity for 30% less cost. Savings can grow to over 45% in larger configurations.

The 181GB drives provide value for numerous high-capacity and bandwidthintensive applications and environments such as streaming video, imaging and data warehousing.

The new high-speed 36GB drives directly complement the 181GB drives by providing maximized customer value in high-performance I/O situations such as online transaction processing (OLTP) environments. Testing has shown an average performance increase of up to 46% over the 36GB 10K counterpart in such environments.

With CLARiiON's Web-enabled, easy-to-use management software, EMC ControlCenter Navisphere, customers are able to securely manage and leverage their information resources from a standard Internet connection -- anywhere in the world. Navisphere's storage provisioning capabilities provide customers with the ability to carve up "storage groups" within a CLARiiON system for allocation to specific applications -- providing quality of service levels. For instance, a storage group can be created comprising of 181GB drives and assigned to a document management application. Likewise, an OLTP application can be assigned to a storage group of 36GB 15K drives. This advanced technology allows CLARiiON customers to sharply reduce management requirements of their information storage while maintaining the demanding service levels of the business.

The 181GB drives are available immediately with CLARiiON FC4500 and FC4700 enterprise storage systems; the 36 GB 15,000 RPM drives are available immediately with CLARiiON FC5300, FC4500 and FC4700 systems. Both drives are available through all of EMC's channel partners and can be intermixed in CLARiiON FC4500 and FC4700 systems.

The EMC CLARiiON line of enterprise storage systems has amassed a host of industry accolades, including PC Magazine's Award for Innovation in Infrastructure and eWEEK eXcellence Award as the leading B2B infrastructure product. Together, EMC Symmetrix and EMC CLARiiON information storage platforms offer an unmatched information storage infrastructure, helping customers protect and leverage all their information -- from workgroup to workforce and beyond.

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing the information infrastructure for a connected world. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.emc.com.