EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, has introduced EMCR Virtual Provisioning and new management capabilities for EMC Symmetrix DMX enterprise storage systems.
By further helping to simplify and speed both virtual and physical provisioning of storage capacity, EMC is continuing to help customers to lower the total cost of ownership in high-end storage environments.
Virtual Provisioning for Symmetrix DMX simplifies and accelerates the process of allocating storage capacity across storage tiers in a storage array, including the highest performance "tier zero" using solid state drives (SSDs), based on specific application requirements.
It enables the Symmetrix DMX system to present an application with more capacity than is physically allocated, delivering "just-in-time" capacity allocation and enhanced management flexibility, while improving overall system utilisation and energy efficiency.
Optimised for enterprise environments, EMC Virtual Provisioning is an enterprise-class implementation of thin provisioning that will offer seamless support for remote and local replication operations, supporting virtual-to-virtual (thin-to-thin) replication for EMC SRDFR (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) remote replication software and EMC TimeFinder replication software.
Virtual Provisioning enables comprehensive monitoring, automated alerts and provides reporting, forecasting and chargeback using EMC ControlCenter software to further optimise management efficiency.
"No one understands high-end storage infrastructure requirements like EMC, with more customers trusting our mission-critical storage operations to Symmetrix DMX than any other storage platform," said Gerhard van der Merwe, Country Manager of EMC South Africa. "Complemented by our best-in-class physical provisioning capabilities, Symmetrix DMX-4 offers full-featured thin provisioning that enterprise customers can depend on for simplified management and improved utilisation in demanding production, replication and application development operations."
EMC has also announced support for the latest one terabyte SATA II disk drives on Symmetrix DMX-4 systems, providing a new level of storage density while also enhancing energy efficiency. With its new support for ultra-high performance flash storage technology, Fibre Channel disk drives and high-capacity SATA II drives within the same array, EMC offers the industry's broadest range of storage tiering options, enabling all application tiers to be consolidated within a single system - giving customers the ability to align data availability and service level requirements with capacity and cost considerations. "In the box" tiered storage also helps reduce management complexity and staffing overhead, while enhancing resource utilisation and driving greater energy efficiency.
New Symmetrix remote replication, mainframe, security capabilities
EMC SRDFR remote replication software, the most widely used in the industry, has also been enhanced to further help customers with multiple sites meet stringent recovery point objectives (RPO) for business continuity purposes.
The new SRDF/Cascaded feature uses the synchronous and asynchronous mirroring capabilities of SRDF to mirror data from the primary data centre to two remote sites. This latest multi-site replication feature improves efficiency and uses less storage by eliminating the need for two copies of data at the middle site, while improving the RPO of the third site. With this very practical approach, customers can achieve the highest level of business continuity readiness, with up-to-date copies of their data stored in multiple remote locations.
EMC has also introduced new mainframe features. Symmetrix DMX supports the latest HyperPAV functionality of IBM's newest zSeries platforms. HyperPAVs process multiple I/Os (input/output) per volume more efficiently to improve utilisation of storage resources. In addition, EMC's new Native Flash support assures mainframe customers of compatibility with IBM replication functionality.
EMC has also announced IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) and IPsec (IP Security) support for both Symmetrix DMX-3 and DMX-4 systems. IPv6 is the emerging new addressing standard for large-scale IP networks, and this support enables Symmetrix DMX systems to meet the US Federal Government procurement requirements for 2008.
The native IPsec capability implements the industry-standard IP data encryption protocol within Symmetrix, which is used for both iSCSI host attachment and for remote replication over an IP network. Both features will be offered on new Gigabit Ethernet directors for Symmetrix DMX-3 and DMX-4 systems. The native implementation can help customers significantly reduce costs and complexity for encrypting data in flight over IP networks.
Availability:
All of the new features announced today will be available and priced separately.
Support for one terabyte SATA II disk drives is scheduled to be available later in Q1 2008.
EMC Virtual Provisioning, Cascaded SRDF, HyperPAV and Native Flash compatibility, and IPv6/IPsec support are scheduled to be available for both Symmetrix DMX-4 and Symmetrix DMX-3 customers later in Q1 2008.
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