EMC Corporation Expands Symmetrix Family with New Storage Systems and Enhancements

Strategic Insights -

EMC Corporation, the world's leading independent provider of mainframe storage solutions, has announced a series of additions and enhancements to its highly-successful Symmetrix family of Integrated Cached Disk Array (ICDA) storage systems. The introduction, led by the new Symmetrix 5100, extends Symmetrix more deeply into lower-capacity data center environments and further expands the competitive advantages that EMC can provide to customers with the entire Symmetrix 5000 product series.

Key Takeaways:

  • The new Symmetrix 5100 ICDA subsystem provides customers with storage requirements under 200 GB the performance, availability, connectivity and cost-of-ownership benefits of EMC's Symmetrix 5000 series.
  • EMC's unique RAID-S parity-based data protection implementation provides Symmetrix 5000 series users with a combination of high availability, high performance and higher usable storage capacity for RAID-protected data.
  • The Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) Extended Distance is now in general availability, providing mainframe users the only unlimited distance, continuous data availability storage solution currently available.
  • The Symmetrix 5100 was developed as a direct result of customer demand for a scalable mainframe storage system that addresses increasing performance and functionality requirements at an affordable price for data centers with smaller or more distributed capacity requirements.
  • HBO, a leading provider of premium cable TV programming, is an early recipient of the Symmetrix 5100, utilizing it to access, update and store information constantly, supporting 250,000 transactions per day with an average of 300 I/Os per transaction.
  • The new Symmetrix 5100 provides customers with 93% of transactions having a response time of less than one second, making it an attractive option for customers with modest capacity requirements but high performance and availability demands.
  • The company incorporates new technology, including four gigabyte, 3.5 inch disks, into its successful Symmetrix 5200 system, providing increases for both performance and capacity.
  • Symmetrix Manager is a graphical interface that provides customers with easier access to information and statistics about their storage system's configuration and performance.
  • Hyper-Volume Extension option enhancements increase the number of Hyper-Volumes per physical disk from three to eight and make optimal use of Symmetrix storage capacity.

Statistics:

  • 250,000: Average number of transactions per day handled by the Symmetrix 5100 for HBO.
  • 300: Average number of I/Os per transaction.
  • 93%: Response time of less than one second for Symmetrix 5100 transactions.
  • 4GB: Capacity of new 3.5 inch disks incorporated into Symmetrix 5200 system.
  • 8: Number of Hyper-Volumes per physical disk supported by enhanced Hyper-Volume Extension option.

Sources:

  • EMC Corporation press release, April 17, 1995.
  • International Data Corporation market research report.
  • Business Wire press release, April 17, 1995.