EMC Corp. says its three new storage models will reduce cost of ownership while improving information consolidation.
The Hopkinton, Mass-based company unveiled the Symmetrix 8000 series on Monday consisting of the 8830, 8530 and the 8230. All models are currently shipping.
David Donatelli, EMC senior vice-president of corporate marketing and new business development, says the 8830 is head and shoulders above the competition in a number of important areas. This includes million instructions per second (MIPS), more than six times that of its nearest competitor, 64GB of global cache, twice that of its next competitor, and again doubling the competition with 69.5 terabytes of storage capacity.
Hewlett-Packard Canada’s business manager for enterprise storage Paul Patternson says EMC won’t hold the storage capacity title for long. He says HP will be doubling its capacity to more than 70 terabytes this quarter, but adds winning the numbers race isn’t a top priority. What’s most important is to be up and running 24/7 regardless of hardware and software upgrades and changes.
“IT managers today are saying, ‘It’s hard for me to add more data and it’s hard for me to manage it.’ So it’s great you’re coming out with these 181GB disc drives, but what other things are you doing to help me manage my disc array better?” says Patterson.
“It’s great if you have a box that’s performing very well on NT, but what about if it’s hooked up to NT and Solaris and HP UX and Linux? You gotta make sure that it’s tweaked to do that.”
Tony Prigmore, senior analyst Enterprise Storage Group, Milford, Mass., says this is an impressive offering and calls EMC’s software the best in the business.
“If I’m the competition life just became more difficult. EMC’s customer base now has more of a reason to stay with the EMC brand,” says Prigmore.
Joe Tucci, EMC president and CEO, says the ever-increasing need for storage is being driven by a state of “hyper-consolidation.” While 1999 and 2000 were about unchecked growth and opportunity, he says companies are reigning in spending and scrutinizing every dime spent.
“In good times and in bad times, enterprises have to do two things. One, they need to get a good reach on their customers: they have to understand the buying patterns of their customers, they have to understand their customers needs, they have to make sure they’re giving customers fantastic customer service,” says Tucci. “Also we have to take the demand that our customers are putting on us and feed it back into our supply chain process.
“Both of these processes also have one thing in common and that is that they need a lot of information to work. And indeed this explains why even in this tough economic environment we see information growing year in, year out. In fact it’s almost doubling.”