Faster, Compatible StorageFaster, Compatible Storage

EMC CORP. LAST WEEK provided details on the major upgrade to its Symmetrix enterprise storage system that's been three years in the making. At an event in New York, the company touted its new controller's enhanced speed and backward compatibility, as well as its lower price.

With the Symmetrix DMX (Direct Matrix Architecture) system, EMC replaces its shared-bus architecture, in which throughput decreases as queries increase, with a "shared-nothing" controller architecture. EMC says the design enhances performance by enabling every query to find a free path from server to controller and by enabling its Engenuity operating system to better support multiple diverse queries.

Companies can scale the system for online transactional processing queries by adding cache and DMX boards that support throughput of 2 Gbytes per second, according to EMC. Companies also can configure the system with greater capacity on the front-end drives for OLTP queries or on the back end for decision-support queries. The drives, which have Fibre Channel front-end connections to the boards and copper back-end connections, support capacities of 73 Gbytes or 146 Gbytes. The system maxes out at 37 terabytes.

The new pricing model should prove attractive to customers. A Symmetrix DMX800 with a usable 7.2 terabytes of capacity will cost 30% less than its predecessor, the Symmetrix 8530. EMC says it will move data across the system three times as fast.

EMC has made a substantial improvement on performance, and backward compatibility is very important to customers, says Giga Information Group analyst Anders Lofgren. But he adds that the company is still "in a horse race" with competitors such as Hitachi Data Systems.

Information Resources Inc., a market-data analysis firm for some of the country's biggest packaged-goods and health-care companies, tracks 28 million items, stores around 150 attributes for each, processes 160 billion summarized transactions per week, and maintains a 40-terabyte data warehouse. The immensity of those tasks led Marshall Gibbs, the company's CIO, to become a beta tester of the DMX system. In heavy load tests, throughput and reliability have been high without any trade-off of redundancy for very strong performance. "We get data off the box much faster than I've ever seen before," Gibbs says, "and we're not saturating DMX."

The management software and services offered with the new system fit well into the company's vision of helping automate network storage for customers, says Joe Tucci, president and CEO at EMC. The company has bolstered its services staff in the last year to 5,500 people. "Customers are more than ever looking for help," Tucci says. Along with the system improvements, that's another way EMC plans to get back some of the high-end mindshare and market share it has lost to HDS, which Tucci admits "eclipsed us in raw performance."

Available now, Symmetrix DMX systems are priced from $409,000 to $2.5 million, based on configuration and capacity. "There are 50,000 Symmetrix systems out there, and we're hoping for the old pent-up demand," says Tucci, adding that "this year, that's hoping in a flat market that we do better than the market."

Meta Group analyst Sean Derrington doesn't believe EMC will see the same profit margins it managed in the '90s, but says the vendor is back on top of its game. "The real telling will be over the next three months," he adds, "as we see diverse workloads running on DMX."