Features - Storage Innovations:

EMC ROLLS OUT NEW HIGH-END STORAGE GEAR

Reuters' Duncan Martell reports that EMC Corp has announced two new offerings in its Symmetrix high-end line of data storage products, adding to a product line that has won back market share from rivals International Business Machines Corp (IBM).

The two new products, one at the high end and a lower cost version of its most expensive data storage products, follow the announcement six months ago of the DMX version of its Symmetrix line of products.

"It's another step that extends a lead that they have only recently regained," said Robert Passmore, vice president of research for Gartner Inc. "This announcement sort of puts the icing on the cake."

The Symmetrix DMX3000 has a capacity of 192 drives to 576 drives, allowing for usable capacities of up to 73.5 terabytes, EMC said, and has twice the capacity of the Symmetrix DMX 2000. The price starts at $1.7 million, compared with a starting price of $1.2 million for its precursor, the DMX2000, an EMC spokesman said.

The less expensive DMX800 starts at $284,000, compared with a starting price of $450,000 for the prior version of the product, the EMC spokesman said. The DMX800 is aimed at being the entry-level machine in EMC's high-end product offerings. Capacity for the DMX800 is more than 17 terabytes.

In the 1990s, EMC took significant market share from rivals and racked up sales and profits at the expense of computer server companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co, which sell their own storage equipment or resell others'.

"By around 2000 what happened was most of the competitors caught up on features," Passmore said. "EMC lost some significant market share in 2001, and, to a certain extent, in 2002."

EMC will also be the first major storage company to have high-end storage equipment that supports an emerging standard for sharing and managing data over Ethernet networks, known as iSCSI, Passmore said.

The iSCSI standard makes it both easier and cheaper for computers to share and manage data across networked storage equipment, he said.

"Here, EMC is early," Passmore said, adding that other storage equipment companies will be announcing their own products that support iSCSI in the next 12 months.

Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC also said that its Symmetrix DMX now supports Fibre Channel connectivity to mainframe computers, including IBM iSeries servers. Fibre Channel is an established technology for transmitting data among computer devices at high speeds and over long distances.

Bear Stearns analyst Andrew Neff wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday that while EMC's DMX3000 would still lag Hitachi's Lightning product with 150 terabytes of capacity, it will narrow the gap it had previously, and will be ahead of IBM's Shark storage product with capacity of 56 terabytes.