Top Of The News - Hardware:

EMC Sets New Price Point For Mid-Tier Networked Storage

EMC Corporation has once again expanded and enhanced the industry's broadest lineup of storage platforms -- offering customers even more choice and flexibility to meet today's wide range of automated networked storage requirements. EMC announced significant enhancements to the CLARiiON CX200 networked storage system, including a new single-controller option with estimated end-user pricing starting at approximately $10,000, integrated ATA drive technology and a 60% performance boost. In addition, EMC further simplified CLARiiON system management through the addition of customer-executable, non disruptive upgrades for CLARiiON software applications.

Joel Schwartz, EMC's senior vice president & General Manager, CLARiiON Systems Division, said, "Today, a broader range of customers are demanding access to EMC's innovative storage technology. These businesses are looking for an upgradeable product line that can grow and adapt in concert with their environment. With these new enhancements to the CX200, EMC is offering a very attractive entry point into the industry's leading mid-tier product series."

Randy Kerns, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group, said, "EMC continues to deliver products that enhance their partners' capabilities to address the requirements of small to mid-size businesses. The ability to support high-performance drives for OLTP applications and ATA disk technology for backup-to-disk in one system is very appealing to end-users. Additionally, with the CLARiiON CX200, partners are equipped with a leading price/performance solution."

Mobliss, a leading mobile media company that worked with EMC partner OptiStor Technologies, recently purchased EMC CLARiiON CX200 as well as EMC Navisphere and EMC Access Logix management software to support the company's Mobile Interactive television (moTV) initiative.

Hernan Alvarez, vice president of Infrastructure at Mobliss, said, "Each week, millions of viewers watch reality television shows that provide the viewer with the opportunity to vote contestants off the program and out of the competition. When viewers vote via text messaging, Mobliss' CX200-based infrastructure supports the application logic and message queuing that processes the information and counts the votes in real time. Text messaging is fast becoming the hottest way for fans to interact with their favorite TV shows and sporting events. Mobliss' moTV system routinely processes several thousand text messages per second, which live on the CLARiiON CX200."

The centerpiece of the announcement is the entry-level member of the popular CLARiiON CX series. The CX200 is optimized for those organizations and departments who need the most cost-effective and easy-to-use system, while also providing a clear upgrade path for future growth. EMC's CX200 provides a full range of data integrity features including parity checking and disk scrubbing, leading price/performance and intuitive management software.

This announcement highlights a number of customer benefits through increased breadth and scale of the CLARiiON CX200 system, including:

• Lower entry price: Customers can now purchase CX200 systems at a new entry price via the single-controller option. These customers can easily upgrade to the CX200 dual-controller model without movement or migration of data.
• More power: CX200 system performance has increased 60% to 40,000 I/Os per second -- enhancing its price/performance leadership. This boost in performance enables customers to consolidate more servers, support more users per server and increase transaction rates.
• Increased capacity: Joining the CX400 and CX600, CX200 systems are now expandable to 6 terabytes using ATA drive technology. New and existing CX200 customers are able to intermix Fibre Channel and ATA drives in the same CX200 system to maximize usage of the storage infrastructure.

Customers can use high-performance Fibre Channel drives for online transactional, file/print, messaging or Web applications, while ATA drives can be used for backup-to-disk operations -- all in the same array. This combined infrastructure of primary and secondary storage reduces management costs and improves service levels.

CLARiiON CX is the only series of products in the industry with the ability to mix Fibre Channel and ATA drives in the same system.

Ease of use: Customers are now able to perform non disruptive upgrades to CLARiiON's FLARE(TM) operating system and applications such as Navisphere and Access Logix(TM). The web-enabled Navisphere management interface offers guidance and progress indicators to ensure a successful upgrade. This new capability enhances CLARiiON's heritage of seamless upgradeability and simplified system management.

Alvarez added, "As a relatively new company, we needed a flexible networked storage platform with superior performance at a competitive price. But more importantly, we needed a system with a clear and compatible upgrade path. Our business is extremely fast-paced and is rapidly expanding. The CLARiiON CX series offers us the reassurance that we can upgrade, with data in place, as our performance and capacity needs change."

CLARiiON CX systems continue to offer customers a unique and powerful upgrade path. With today's announcement, customers are able to purchase a single-controller CX200 and upgrade with data in place to CLARiiON's flagship CX600 system. This upgrade path extends through dual-controller CX200 and CX400 networked storage systems. CLARiiON's advanced modular architecture, common reusable components and common software protects customer investments as requirements change.

(a) Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays, 1H03," S. Zaffos, N. Allen, R. W. Cox, J. Krischer, R. Passmore. 8 May 2003.