EMC Announces New Systems and Software

EMC announced a new Symmetrix lineup that includes the Symmetrix 8230, with as much as 4.3TB of storage; the Symmetrix 8530 (17.3TB); and Symmetrix 8830 (69.5TB). EMC says that the high-end system performs at 61,760 MIPS--more than twice the processing power of the previous models--with a global cache of 64GB and support for 8000 logical units, 96 direct fibre-channel connections, 384 external fibre-channel connections, 512 logical Enterprise Systems Connection (ESCON) paths, and 512 Fibre Connection (FICON) logical paths. Major enhancements to the Enginuity Operating Environment--the "brains" of Symmetrix--provide increased addressability (i.e., more servers, logical paths, volumes, and partitions), increased concurrency, and parallelism.

EMC also announced the Symmetrix Global Cache Director with CacheStorm, a parallel-cache technology. EMC said that this technology enhances system performance and throughput, improves responsiveness, and manages peak workloads, resulting in a maximum 64GB of cache. Parallel-cache technology includes a series of techniques that lowers the need for shared-cache memory and optimizes system resources, thus eliminating bottlenecks associated with cache memory. These techniques include the following:

EMC also announced mainstream adoption of 181GB drives, which dramatically increase capacity and maintain the performance levels that highly consolidated environments require. The company will make the drives available for general-purpose, enterprise-information consolidation.

http://www.emc.com