EMC Unveils Long-Awaited Symmetrix UpgradeEMC Unveils Long-Awaited Symmetrix Upgrade

EMC Corp. has spent three years choosing, designing, and manufacturing its next-generation high-end Symmetrix storage system architecture. For the last 18 months, every Symmetrix engineer has focused on the system, which was unveiled Monday in New York.

The Symmetrix Direct Matrix Architecture system is flush with functionality, yet it's backward compatible with existing Symmetrix hardware and software. Before, the storage system was based on a shared-bus architecture that topped out at high levels of performance and response times. DMX is a shared-nothing architecture that lets customers scale the system by having EMC add cache boards with 2 Gbytes each of optical network performance. The boards are connected by Fibre Channel to front-end drives of either 73 Gbytes or 146 Gbytes of capacity and by copper to back-end drives of the same specs. Customers can have boards and drives mixed and matched by EMC to deal with transactions or data-mining queries.

As a result, EMC customers will only have to know as much about the architecture as they want. To them, Direct Matrix Architecture is supposed to mean 37 terabytes of capacity in a high-performance system. Customers will care a lot about the new market-pricing model by which EMC will operate. A Symmetrix DMX800 with 7.2 usable terabytes of capacity will cost 30% less than its Symmetrix 8530 predecessor, if the bus architecture-based system could be called that, and perform three times better at moving data between the back end and the front end.

Joe Tucci, EMC's president and CEO, likes the way Symmetrix DMX fits into the vendor's total blueprint for customers, called Automated Network Storage. It includes the Symmetrix and CX midrange hardware, but big parts are also management software such as Auto IS and services. Tucci says the company hired services personnel last year to bring the number of services-focused staff up to 5,500. "Customers are more than ever looking for help," he says. Tucci admits that EMC lost some high-end mindshare and market share last year to Hitachi Data Systems because "they eclipsed us in raw performance," after he scrapped an interim project so engineers could focus on Direct Matrix Architecture. EMC could have broken tradition and unveiled Direct Matrix Architecture ahead of time. "But it would have sounded like an excuse," Tucci says.

Symmetrix Direct Matrix Architecture systems are available now. Pricing ranges from $409,000 to $2.5 million, based on configuration and capacity.

EMC has at least made a substantial imprint on performance, Giga Information Group analyst Anders Lofgren says, adding that he'll need some industry benchmark before getting beyond the leapfrog played by EMC and Hitachi. "We're still in a horse race," he says, "but the backward compatibility, on launch day, is what's very important to customers."