EMC cuts costs on NAS systems

The new models include the Celerra NS500, which is available in an integrated or gateway configuration with one or two data movers; and the Celerra NS704G NAS gateway, which comes with four data movers and supports both single and dual Control Station configurations. It is capable of more than 100,000 NFS operations per second.

EMC also announced a new version of its DART operating environment, which includes enhancements to Celerra Manager Basic Edition and support for iSCSI. The latter effectively makes the Celerra an all-in-one storage solution that allows customers to consolidate both storage and servers into a single, centrally managed platform.

New features include a graphical at-a-glance status monitoring capability that helps administrators quickly identify potential system or performance issues. The status screen displays memory and CPU usage, performance and throughput information, number of active network connections, information about open files, storage utilization, and more.

Also, through integration with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services, users can now perform file-level restores using Microsoft Explorer's "previous versions" property tab. This capability can lower customers' support costs by enabling users to recover their own files, EMC said.

The new NAS systems are available immediately. The Celerra NS500 costs $40,000 for a 1TB, single-data-mover, integrated configuration with CIFS and SnapSure. The Celerra NS704G costs $165,000 for a four-data-mover configuration with CIFS and SnapSure.