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EMC Corporation has announced new technology and configurations for its flagship EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 storage system. The announcement was made at a media and analyst event in London with EMC senior executives detailing several new technologies and additions to the EMC product lineup. EMC announced availability of the first storage array capable of scaling to more than one petabyte (1,024 terabytes) of capacity. The record capacity is made possible through the qualification of Symmetrix DMX-3 system configurations supporting up to 2,400 disk drives and the availability of new 500 gigabyte low-cost Fibre Channel (LC-FC) disk drives. This new disk drive technology, compatible with all Symmetrix DMX systems, enables EMC to provide customers with significant total cost of ownership benefits by enabling the consolidation of more information, applications and storage tiers into fewer arrays and storage networks. EMC is the first to deliver this new disk drive technology in a high-end array. EMC also introduced a new entry-level Symmetrix DMX-3 system configuration. This system allows customers to incrementally scale the performance and capacity of a single array from 7 terabytes, using 96 disk drives, to more than a petabyte with 2,400 disk drives. The Symmetrix DMX-3 system was specifically designed with the performance, scalability and reliability required to support high-end configurations in a single array. Customers can non-disruptively scale capacity, performance or both to meet their changing storage requirements. The extensible DMX architecture provides the Symmetrix DMX-3 system with near linear performance scalability as channel directors, memory directors and disk directors are added to the system. "The foundation of an ILM strategy is tiered storage," said David Donatelli, EMC Executive Vice President, Storage Platforms Operations. "Tiered storage is about service levels and ensuring information is in the appropriate location based on its value and importance at any given time. Previously that has meant separate platforms for each tier. The new capabilities of the EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 system give customers groundbreaking flexibility by enabling them to bring together all of their information for easier management and greater cost savings. Customers can now cost-effectively take advantage of Symmetrix's industry-leading performance, scalability and data protection across more of their applications and for more of their information." In addition to new Symmetrix DMX-3 system configurations, EMC today introduced several information management software and technology enhancements for the Symmetrix DMX-3 system, including: - Native Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) support for host and remote replication on Symmetrix DMX-3 systems, which eliminates the expense of external channel converters and gateways when replicating large amounts of data over less-expensive Ethernet networks. This support is fully backwards compatible with prior-generation Symmetrix DMX arrays and the Symmetrix 8000 series. - Symmetrix DMX-3 system support of the IBM iSeries system, the only non-IBM storage array that supports the popular midrange server platform. - Symmetrix DMX-3 system support of TPF (Transaction Processing Facility), a real-time operating system for IBM mainframe environments. EMC z/OS Storage Manager software, which provides mainframe-native management for all Symmetrix storage systems and improves management of storage arrays in a mainframe environment. Charles King, Principal Analyst, Pund-IT Research, added, "The biggest challenge for customers is not storing massive amounts of data, it is managing and protecting that information while ensuring it is available to those who need it, when they need it. With Symmetrix DMX-3 and the introduction of LC-FC drives, EMC has a platform that enables customers to bring more of their information together along with innovative software that gives customers the ability to effectively manage that information throughout its useful life."