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EMC Debuts DMX, Part Deux: Page 2 of 4

Analysts say the new high-end DMX3000, with its combination of greater capacity, Ficon connectivity, and asynchronous replication, effectively fills in the last holes the DMX line had in EMC's ongoing competition with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM).

EMC will "likely shut off most of the remaining issues that competitors such as Hitachi Data Systems... and IBM have used against EMC, helping to ease EMC's selling effort and providing more opportunities for market-share gains," wrote Goldman Sachs & Co. analyst Laura Conigliaro in a research note yesterday.

Joe Tucci, president and CEO of EMC, acknowledged that the company had lost bids with certain customers that needed more capacity than the 288 drives offered by the DMX2000, because it had to offer two systems.

"It was an area for us of some losses, because obviously it's more expensive for us to offer two systems [instead of one]," he said. "One of our gaps was not having a system with more than 288 drives." EMC now expects to get "incremental wins" for this class of customer. Tucci added that, to date, "absolutely zero accounts" have requested a system with more than 400 drives.

Since its February launch of the Symmetrix DMX -- which features a "matrix" architecture EMC claims kicks up the system's internal bandwidth to 64 GByte/s -- EMC has been hamstrung in selling storage to mainframe customers because of the lack of Ficon support. As a stopgap measure, EMC rolled out the Symmetrix z8000, based on the previous-generation architecture (see EMC Soups Up Symm and EMC Boosts Symm 8000, Intros z8000).