EMC improves security, energy efficiency
In line with popular green sentiments, EMC has announced the release of a new version of its flagship product, Symmetrix, with major improvements to energy efficiency.
The DMX-4 family supports 750GB SATA II or 4GB/s fibre channel disk drives, which EMC claims makes the Symmetrix product up to 70 percent more energy efficient than similar IBM, Hewlett-Packard, NetApp and Sun platforms.
EMC has also targeted compliance with data privacy and security regulations with the DMX-4, incorporating RSA's EnVision technology enabling audit logs of administrator activity to be kept.
The range will be available in August 2007. In 2008, EMC plans to release thin provisioning capabilities to the platform.
President of EMC Australia and New Zealand, David Webster said the Symmetrix platform offers improvements to organisations' business continuity capabilities via Symmetrix software designed to enable long distance data replication.
"Previously the distance was limited but now you can synchronously replicate data almost from Sydney to Melbourne," he said.
EMC also announced upgrades to its content-addressable storage (CAS) archiving platform, Centera along with the mid-range CLARiiON networked storage platforms.
Called Centera Generation 4 LP ("low power"), the nodes support 750 GB SATA disk drives and offer 50 percent more storage capacity. EMC claims the new disk drives and design provide a 67 percent reduction in energy consumption per terabyte.
EMC has incorporated its MD5-hashing algorithm in the new Centera despite widespread criticism of the technology for being flawed. The hashing algorithm is used to ensure the integrity and authenticity of archived documents such as e-mails, corporate records and medical x-ray images.
In May this year, EMC denied rumours that it would be releasing a "Centera 2" to address complaints with its hashing algorithm. EMC said that changes to Centera's architecture would be "evolutionary rather than revolutionary". IT has used the MD5-hashing algorithm since the first release of Centera in 2001.
Meanwhile EMC has added new security features and added support for Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity to the CLARiiON platform.