New EMC Celerra Unified Storage Systems with Deduplication Top Industry Offerings; Up to 22 Percent Lower TCO

Next Generation Celerra NS Series Helps Drive Down Costs with Comprehensive, Built-in VMware, NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel Storage Features

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News Summary

HOPKINTON, Mass.– February 23, 2009–EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced a new lineup of EMC® Celerra® unified storage systems, the NS-120, NS-480, NS-960 and NS-G8 Gateway, featuring the industry’s most comprehensive set of built-in features. The innovative Celerra NS line, with integrated NAS (network attached storage), iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity, is more flexible and provides more overall value than any system of its kind. In 2008, revenues from the Celerra NS line outpaced the market, growing more than 40 percent, by providing customers with a scalable, simplified and easy to manage solution.

The new multi-protocol EMC® Celerra® NS models combine new software innovations, including file system deduplication, file-level retention and compliance capabilities with the five-nines (99.999%) reliability and advanced capabilities of EMC CLARiiON® CX4 storage systems to provide up to 22 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to other systems in the market. These new features expand upon existing built-in capabilities, including advanced IP storage replication, automated volume management for optimized storage tiering and thin provisioning.

The new Celerra NS-120, NS-480, NS-960, and NS-G8 Gateway systems provide:

• Power and Capacity Efficiencies
  • Celerra Data Deduplication with Compression for primary file systems and end user file data in VMware and other virtualized environments. Included at no additional cost, this feature maximizes storage efficiency by eliminating redundant data and can reduce filesystem capacity up to 50 percent. Celerra Data Deduplication features an intuitive single-click startup with automated policies and is fully integrated into Celerra Manager for added ease of use. The integration of technologies from EMC Avamar® and EMC RecoverPoint® into the Celerra operating environment enables compression on all inactive files, then removes duplicates on the Celerra, without imposing limits on supported filesystem sizes or use of functionality like snapshots. EMC is the only vendor to offer compression for filesystem data deduplication for increased storage efficiency.
  • Enterprise Flash Drive technology for Celerra, which stores data on highly reliable flash memory, can result in up to an 800 percent performance improvement compared to traditional Fibre Channel drives. Enterprise Flash Drives deliver sub-millisecond response times and are 98 percent more energy efficient on an IOPs (Input/Output operations Per Second) basis. EMC is the first to deliver this new technology for NAS environments and pioneered the use of Enterprise Flash Drives across its product lineup.
  • Low Power SATA II disk drive technology on Celerra systems enables optimized data placement on Celerra systems, providing more cost-effective storage based on service level requirements. SATA II disk drives require 32 percent less energy per terabyte than traditional one terabyte SATA disk drives. The new Celerra lineup supports the mixing of Enterprise Flash and low power SATA II drives, helping drive down costs, providing flexibility and improving power efficiency. EMC now offers a mix of SATA II and Enterprise Flash drives across all of its major storage platforms.

• Robust Management Tools for VMware Environments
  • VMware Site Recovery Manager Automated Failback via a VMware vCenter plug-in helps Celerra customers coordinate a “failback” to the original virtual infrastructure, including all the process steps once VMware Site Recovery Manager performs a failover. EMC offers the only solution on the market today that arms customers with end-to-end disaster recovery at the simple push of a button.
  • VMware View Storage Integration, a VMware vCenter plug-in helps administrators easily—and rapidly—provision virtual desktops leveraging Celerra's snapshot features and VMware View. The combined functionality of Celerra SnapSure and VMware View gives customers the choices of provisioning methodology and a deployment tool using vCenter as the common management application
  • VMware View used in tandem with Celerra Deduplication for primary data can deliver the highest storage efficiency for both boot and user data. Together, they deliver the highest TCO for virtualized client deployments.

• Simplified Management
  • Celerra Provisioning Wizard simplifies initial storage provisioning, implements best practices, and validates operations. The software is pre-loaded for easy installation, and systems ordered in an EMC rack are fully cabled.
  • Celerra Unified Storage Connectivity enables consolidation of servers running multiple operating systems with separate storage onto a single platform.  In addition to supporting NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel, the EMC patented Multi-Path File System (MPFS) is supported for bandwidth intensive applications.
  • Celerra File-Level Retention enables WORM (write once, read many) functionality on file systems for information governance. A new compliance option to this feature prevents locked files from being deleted in order to meet regulatory requirements.

• Increased Capacity and Scalability and Greater Flexibility
  • Scalability of Celerra systems up to 960 disk drives, twice that of previous systems. In addition, using the latest EMC CLARiiON CX4 midrange storage technology, the new Celerra systems feature up to twice the performance of previous generations.
  • Flexibility through EMC UltraFlex™ technology provides multi-protocol, online-expandable connectivity options and the ability to integrate future storage technologies as they become available. The new Celerra systems also include immediately available high throughput front-end configurations with up to 32 10 Gigabit Ethernet NAS and iSCSI ports in a single unified storage system, over 40 percent more interfaces than other high-end unified storage systems.
  • Celerra NS-G8 Gateway systems provide even greater flexibility and choice by enabling connection to an existing SAN (storage area network) through a separate CLARiiON or EMC Symmetrix® storage system.

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, which is internationally recognized for its research and education in natural and engineering sciences, uses multiple Celerra NS systems for its Fileservices, VMware, Oracle and Exchange environments and beta tested the new Celerra Data Deduplication feature.

“Our EMC Celerra systems support some of the most critical applications for our university and staff, including 3,000 Exchange clients as well as I/O intensive research applications, the internet presence of more than 250 institutes and the home directories of 35,000 students and staff members,” said Uli Betzler, Senior Storage Architect, KIT. “Given that some of our clients put a very high workload on the systems, we strive to make our VMware, NFS and iSCSI storage environments as efficient as possible. The Celerra Data Deduplication feature showed a 25 percent reduction in the amount of primary data in our fileservice environment, while improving overall system performance. Many of the files stored on the Celerra are large and deduplication will result in cost savings for the KIT with the benefit of faster access to the files. Beyond that, even the small files in typical user profiles show an impressive compression ratio with EMC’s Data Deduplication feature.”

Steve Scully, Research Manager, Enterprise Storage Systems at IDC, said, “In this environment, IT managers are looking to get the most value out of their limited budgets and for technology that will help their bottom lines. Unified storage is clearly an area where customers are getting this value as well as increasing the operational efficiency of their environments. By consolidating VMware, Windows, Linux and Unix environments onto a single Celerra NS system, IT managers gain a tremendous amount of flexibility and the ability to deploy and update the latest storage technologies across all application environments as needs dictate.”

Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President, EMC Storage Division, said, “Customers have asked us to help them remove cost and complexity from their IT environments. EMC has a history of incorporating features and flexibility into its Celerra systems that others in the industry either can’t or view as stand-alone products. The new Celerra systems continue this tradition and integrate numerous innovative new capabilities, at no additional charge, into a single, easy-to-use system.”

As with the previous generation, the new easy-to-use Celerra NS models are customer and partner installable. In addition, EMC Global Services and qualified EMC Velocity² Authorized Services Network (ASN) partners offer a range of service and support options. To further help customers lower TCO, EMC Global Financial Services is offering new financing options to help customers more easily deploy the newest unified storage technologies. Click here for additional information about EMC financing options.

Photos

EMC Celerra NS-120

EMC Celerra NS-480

EMC Celerra NS-960

Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President, EMC Storage Division

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