EMC raises the storage bar 19 May, 2008 By Steve Wexler

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According to an analyst comment provided by EMC, these announcements emphasize the strength of their portfolio, and leave the competitors behind. "EMC`s strategy of delivering new features like de-dupe that can be performed at the client through the backup solution stack at the target storage destination will help them address a number of customer requirements where their competitors are left flatfooted -- either with no solution or a solution that isn`t tailored for a specific use case, " said Lauren Whitehouse, Enterprise Strategy Group.

Targeted at the mid market, the EMC NetWorker FastStart is a simplified package of the company`s backup software that will cut deployment time by as much as 75%, and decrease the number of installation steps by up to 80%. Starting at $18,500 and available immediately, it offers one part number that delivers a NetWorker server (Linux or Windows), 20 clients, support for five applications, modules for hot backups (choice of Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange, and Oracle), 10 Tb backup-to-disk or backup to EMC Disk Library, 40- slot Autochanger, and 40 hours of video instructor-led training.

With prices starting at $115,000, the EMC Disk Library 3D 1500 and 3000 are LAN backup-to-disk solutions that will ship at the end of the month. The DL3D 1500 provides up to 36 Tb of usable capacity, and the 3000 up to 148Tb. Both systems use 1Tb SATA disks with RAID 6 protection and include optional Fibre Channel ports for SAN connectivity.

Moving up the food chain, the EMC Disk Library 4000 is getting two new -- and free -- de-duplication and disk drive spin down options that are backward compatible. The policy-based data de-duplicaiton option can increase utilization and reduce replication costs, making the elimination of tape more practical, said Donatelli. And the spin-down option can reduce power and cooling costs by 19%. Combined with the new low-power 5400 rpm 1Tb SATA drives, DL 4000 energy consumption can be reduced by 47%. However while the options are free, they won't ship until the end of July.

Finally the company announced new versions of its backup and recovery solution. The EMC Avamar Data Store Gen 2 and EMC Avamar 4.0 can use up to 43% less energy per terabyte backed up and reduce total cost of ownership by up to 25% compared to the first generation product, and 75% less than tape. In addition, the new software supports 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and offers expanded support for SQL Server 2005, Vista, Native Netware client backup and restore, and Novell Storage Servers volumes on Novell Open Enterprise Server SLES 10. Avamar 4.0 is available immediately and Data Store Gen 2 will be generally available at the end of this week.

Analyst Charles King, Pund-IT Research, was impressed with a number of the announcements and EMC's continuing focus on issues troubling the storage industry, including green computing, solid state drive usage and simplifying storage management. He noted that EMC continues to set the bar for many of these issues and other vendors are either just getting involved, or waiting.

"Nobody has taken the end-to-end way to green storage that EMC has," said King. He believes the new spin-down technology is one of the only such energy-efficiency initiatives around.

EMC is also leading in incorporating solid-state drives into its storage, and that's something he expects to accelerate as prices continue to drop. King expects solid-state, or flash technology, to show up in more EMC products as this trend continues.

Making the technology easier to use, without dropping features, is another EMC innovation, said King. The traditional way of bringing enterprise-class storage to the mid-market is with training wheels, or stripped-out features. "It's a fundamental recognition on EMC's part of the challenges data centers have been seeing for a generation around resources and budgets, and that mid-market companies don't have the resources and budgets of enterprise markets." He said EMC is taking a significant lead by delivering a full version of NetWorker that "should help mid-market companies efficiently and affordably protect their data better than ever before."