EMC announces the CLARiiON with ATA

EMC has introduced CLARiiON with ATA - the only storage system with integrated ATA and Fibre Channel disk drives.

Through the integration of low-cost ATA drives into an existing storage architecture, the EMC CLARiiON networked storage systems enable customers to bring online, more of their offline, tape-based data, to extend its useful life.

"CLARiiON with ATA delivers a storage solution for disk-based backup and restore, as well as for a wide range of primary data currently kept on tape across applications. Typical examples include oil and gas research, telecommunications billing records, government intelligence data and life sciences research," says Alex Robertson, country systems engineering and professional services manager, EMC SA.

He adds that offline data, residing primarily on tape media, continues to represent more than 10 times the amount of online information. Until now, the economics of disk storage forced customers to store a majority of data offline - resulting in substantially lower service levels for most of their information assets.

EMC`s incorporation of ATA technology into the CLARiiON architecture brings more information into online SAN and NAS environments, thus dramatically increasing service levels through improved availability and functionality.

The company has also integrated CLARiiON with ATA with its own backup and restore application, EMC Data Manager (EDM), and fully tested backup vendor applications to offer a high-performance, disk-based alternative to tape backup and restore processes.

While OLTP and other performance-intensive applications will continue to use higher-performing Fibre Channel drives, CLARiiON with ATA blends the economic advantages of ATA disk drives with CLARiiON`s availability and functionality. It will also inherit all the functionality of EMC`s automated storage software, as well as benefiting from the storage management tools available in EMC`s Control Centre family of products.

While list prices for CLARiiON with ATA are higher than those for tape, these systems offer significantly higher performance and reliability. For example, CLARiiON with ATA can accomplish backups in a third less time and restore in 80% less time than tape in typical environments.

Through this integrated approach to online and extended online storage, customers can simply mix any combination of Fibre Channel and ATA device enclosures offering a single solution to store production data and bring offline data online. These systems can be managed and protected through a unified storage management suite - eliminating complexity imposed by other offerings.

"All information wants to live online. Through the combination of ATA economics and integration into the high-availability CLARiiON architecture, EMC now makes this possible," says Robertson.

"Once online, information then can deliver far greater value back to the business through higher service levels. And, through integration into the existing CLARiiON architecture, time to customer value is immediate, because there is nothing new for customers to learn," he concludes.