EMC offers storage de-dupe and flash

On Monday the leader in the data storage market, EMC launched four new arrays that will include de-duplication features and flash storage.

Three of the Celerra arrays are straightforward storage devices and the fourth is a network gateway for clustering storage systems, All are blade arrays offering support for from one to eight blades on he high-end models.

All the arrays support either NAS, MPFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel while the NS-G8 gateway can support NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel.

Also announced were new tools for the arrays to work with VMware virtualisation software. Recovery Manager Automated Failback is a VMware vCenter plug-in is intended to help Celerra customers coordinate a “failback” to the original virtual infrastructure for failover.

VMware View Storage Integration is also a plug-in which can help administrators provision virtual desktops, the company said in a statement. VMware View can be used with Celerra De-duplication of both boot and user data.

Looking at the storage blades in turn, the NS-120 can carry one or two blades and from 32TB to 64TB of storage and it offers failover protection for the data rather than clustering.

The NS-480 offers support for two to four blades and 64 to 192TB of storage and the NS-960 support for two to eight blades and from 128TB to 760TB of storage. Both offer support for clustering.

The Celerra NS-G8 gateway has similar storage features to the other arrays but while the others all are based on EMC's Clariion storage, the NS-G8 supports EMC's Symmetrix high-end storage as well with capacity from 128 to 896TB.

The company is offering flash drives with these arrays, a technology it introduced to its Clariion arrays last year in the CX-4. EMC claims that it is the first to offer solid state with NAS storage. But it has been offering solid-state storage with iSCSI and Fibre Channel since August last year.