In what EMC calls the biggest product launch in its--or the storage industry's--history, the company has announced 41 new products, ranging from SMB storage to enterprise backup and archiving. Today's announcements included EMC's first significant foray into the SMB market and a complete refresh of its midrange Clariion storage area network (SAN) and Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) systems.
"What you're seeing today is EMC 'doubling down' on its core franchise: storage. The technologies are changing, the use cases are changing, and the consumption models are changing," said EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci at the New York event/Webcast. "These new products and capabilities put us in an excellent position to capitalize on the major trends in the IT industry and place us squarely at the intersection of the biggest ones: cloud computing and big data."
Targeted at SMBs and starting at less than $10,000, the EMC VNXe storage system can be configured in minutes. "EMC is now available in small," said Pat Gelsinger, EMC president, Information Infrastructure Products, during the Webcast.
Capabilities and features include application-based provisioning wizards for simplicity, including support for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Hyper-V; compact 2U and 3U packaging; built-in support for file-based (CIFS, NFS) and block-based (iSCSI) storage; built-in data protection (including replication); thin provisioning, file deduplication and compression; 6Gbps SAS and Nearline SAS drive; and scalability up to 120 disk drives (240TBytes).
EMC is replacing its Clariion and Celerra product lines with the VNX series, promising a platform that provides three times simpler management, efficiency and performance. Built around Intel's Xeon 5600 multicore processor technology, it reportedly offers the industry's most advanced automated storage tiering (FAST VP) and is the only storage solution offering both automated file and block sub-LUN (logical unit number) tiering using FAST VP and system cache with FAST Cache. In addition to 6Gbps SAS, Nearline SAS and SSD drive types, the VNX series supports multiple protocols and data types including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FCoE, NFS, CIFS, SOAP and REST. It also scales up to 2 petabytes per system (1,000 drives).
