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.
List pricing for the DMX-3 starts at US$250,000 for a new entry-level configuration with 96 drives and a 7TB capacity. The added configurations, which EMC said were in the works when it introduced the DMX-3 last July, are scheduled to ship in March.
EMC also released a new version of its Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) device that offers tight integration with the Rainfinity Global File Virtualization software that it purchased last August.
The Rainfinity software will allow the consolidation of NAS systems by using a single global namespace, EMC said.
The software virtualizes Windows, Unix and Linux file systems across heterogeneous NAS systems and file servers, making the boxes appear to be a single unit to a host server.
Tony Asaro, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass., said EMC joins a small cadre of vendors offering global namespace technology as a feature on NAS systems.