The DMX-3 can now scale from 96 to 2,400 drives in a single frame for up to 1 petabyte of capacity, said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president of storage platform operations at Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC.

Rich Niemiec, CEO of The Ultimate Software Consultants, a systems integrator in Lombard, Ill., said the capacity of the upgraded array indicates that databases of a similar size could soon follow.

Niemiec noted that when storage vendors started producing terabyte-capacity arrays, "companies started building terabyte databases. Now that we're seeing petabyte [arrays], you know that petabyte databases are just around the corner."

Three Drives

The upgraded DMX-3 also sports three different types of Fibre Channel drives that allow users to move storage across tiers of disks inside the array: a new 500GB drive that runs at 7,200 rpm, a 300GB midrange drive that runs at 10,000 rpm and a 146GB high-end drive that runs at 15,000 rpm.