EMC Announces World's Largest, Fastest and Most Scalable High-End Storage Array

July 25th, 2005

EMC Corporation announced the largest, fastest and most scalable high-end storage array in the world, capable of providing leading functionality while scaling to one petabyte (1,024 terabytes) of capacity. The new Symmetrix DMX-3 system represents another industry milestone for EMC and leverages its market-leading Direct Matrix Architecture to provide demanding customers with unparalleled functionality, performance and tiered storage capabilities in a single system to support their information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies.

The new Symmetrix DMX-3 system complements the current Symmetrix DMX-2 Series of systems, the high-end storage market share leader. The Symmetrix DMX-3 system builds on the success of the existing Symmetrix DMX-2 Series by storing more data and delivering higher performance for customers who want to consolidate their information onto a high-end platform. The Symmetrix DMX-3 exceeds the capabilities of existing systems through a design that features increased processing power and internal bandwidth, new memory technology and support for lower cost disk drives. The Symmetrix DMX-3 system will enable customers to replace multiple existing storage platforms with a single system and pay-as-you-grow economics. The new storage array supports up to 960 disk drives today, and will be qualified to support up to 1,920 disk drives in the first half of 2006 and more than 2,000 by the end of next year.

Tony Prigmore, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said, "The EMC Symmetrix DMX architecture and its capability to scale capacity and performance continue to provide EMC with key competitive advantages. Large storage customers who continue to look for ways to ease management burdens and lower costs through consolidation will find the new Symmetrix DMX-3 offers industry-leading single-system scalability. In particular, we expect the new capability to tier storage within the array to drive demand for EMC's newest member of the DMX series."

Extending High-End Innovation and Leadership

The Symmetrix DMX-3 system was specifically designed with the performance, scalability and reliability required to support high-end configurations in a single array. The extensible DMX architecture provides the Symmetrix DMX-3 with near linear performance scalability as channel directors, memory directors and disk directors are added to the system. With a doubling of internal bandwidth, processing power and the addition of fully mirrored global memory directors based on DDR (Dual Data Rate) SDRAM memory technologies, the Symmetrix DMX-3 is the industry's highest-performing storage array in addition to being the largest.

Kevin Hart, Chief Information Officer at Level 3 Communications, one of the world's largest Internet carriers and a Symmetrix DMX-3 beta site, said, "Level 3 serves many of the world's largest and most sophisticated communications companies, carrying more than three petabytes of IP traffic across our network on a daily basis. As such, our business generates a vast amount of data that is critical to our own operations as well as those of our customers. The processing power and capacity of the EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 will, we believe, help us enhance the efficiency and quality of order management, billing, provisioning and other strategically important back-office processes and systems."

The new Symmetrix DMX-3 array is composed of a single system bay and separate storage bays. Each bay is powered independently and contains a scalable power and battery backup infrastructure to support the components within each bay. System capacity can be upgraded non-disruptively by adding either another storage bay or adding additional disk drives into available space. Likewise, additional processing power can be added by installing additional director boards while the system is online. The Symmetrix DMX-3 is compatible with all of EMC's leading high-end functionality and software.

"The new EMC Symmetrix DMX family delivers on the scalable design promise of the DMX architecture," said David Donatelli, EMC Executive Vice President, Storage Platforms Operations. "Our competition has not been able to match Symmetrix DMX-2's unique combination of scalable performance and functionality, and we are again raising the bar. We introduced innovative new high-end software functionality last year and this new system can take advantage of all of our leading capabilities. This reduces costs for our customers in terms of hardware and software acquisition and maintenance and reduces operational and management expenses. We're allowing customers to do more with less hardware, greatly enhancing total cost of ownership."

New Disk Drives and Data Mobility Software Enable "In-the-Box" Tiered Storage

The entire Symmetrix DMX Series, including the new Symmetrix DMX-3 system, will support new low-cost Fibre Channel (LC-FC) disk drives. This latest disk drive technology, expected to be available in early 2006, will enable "in-the-box" tiered storage, allowing multiple tiers of storage to be implemented in a single Symmetrix DMX system as part of an ILM strategy. Combined with EMC's broad portfolio of array, network and host-based data migration software and professional services, including today's announcement of the new EMC/Softek LDMF and EMC Open Migrator/LM software (see separate releases), EMC is further extending its lead in high-end storage and is providing new ways for enterprise customers to improve the management of information throughout its lifecycle and reduce total cost of ownership.