EMC Announces Content-Addressed Storage Systems

Ushering in what the company calls a new era of "content-addressed storage" (CAS), EMC has launched its new EMC Centera storage architecture. The new architecture is designed to store unchanging data. This "fixed content" includes data such as electronic documents, digital images, and other multimedia (e.g., movies). According to a 1999 University of California at Berkeley survey, information doubles every year and more than 50 percent of all new digital information is fixed content.

EMC Centera systems store several terabytes of data and can scale up to petabytes of storage. Unlike EMC's other storage systems, which use higher-end, more expensive technology such as SCSI, the Centera storage systems use low-cost, PC-style ATA storage. Using ATA technology lets EMC offer the product at about two-thirds the cost of its top-end Symmetrix array.

EMC Centera is available immediately, and prices start at $204,700 for 5TB of protected storage (10TB of raw storage).

http://www.emc.com/products/systems/centera.jsp