ENGINEERING

HOPKINTON, MA -- EMC Corporation has announced a complete new line of EMC Symmetrix systems and enhanced software functionality. With today's announcement, EMC enables customers to achieve unprecedented levels of information consolidation - or hyper-consolidation - while sharply reducing total information storage cost of ownership. EMC delivered major advances in information storage performance, connectivity, capacity, and functionality - including increases of up to 50% for open systems throughput, 100% for mainframe throughput, 260% in capacity and 500% in connectivity. Joe Tucci, EMC President and CEO, said, "Hyper-consolidated enterprise information storage delivers two must-have attributes for customers - increased productivity and lower costs for critical resources. With the new Symmetrix models, EMC continues to be the catalyst for customers' hyper-consolidation efforts of both mainframe and open systems environments. Information storage systems are quickly replacing servers to provide the processing power, capacity and functionality necessary to get the most value from information. EMC Symmetrix systems started that phenomenon, and continue to accelerate it today." Randy Stone, CIO of Teradyne, said, "EMC Symmetrix has been instrumental in our ability to respond quickly to changes in our business. In just 18 months, we added more than 25 locations worldwide, deployed a series of e-business initiatives with suppliers and subcontractors, and more than doubled our network capacity. Through it all, Symmetrix helped us quickly consolidate a series of our platforms and, because of the consistency of the architecture, we knew we could move quickly with low risk levels. Performance, consistency and flexibility of architecture, reliability, total cost of ownership and rapid response to any issues are what customer satisfaction and support is all about. EMC brings it all to the party." The new Symmetrix family - the Symmetrix 8830, 8530 and 8230 systems - highlights the power of the Symmetrix MOSAIC architecture, the foundation of the world's most scalable, available, and reliable storage platform. The modular Symmetrix MOSAIC architecture gives EMC the competitive edge for the consistent, rapid deployment of next-generation storage technology while maintaining an increasingly stable and robust framework over time. As a result, EMC Symmetrix is the world's most widely installed enterprise storage system, having continuously outpaced the industry in system capabilities, investment protection and reliability. The enduring Symmetrix standard stands in contrast to the stop-and-start approaches of other vendors who disrupt their customers' investments by introducing new information storage architectures on a regular basis. Today's announcement includes: Three New Symmetrix Models A complete refresh of the Symmetrix 8000 Enterprise Storage family. The three new models, all shipping today, include: - Symmetrix 8830 - The world's highest-capacity, highest-density, information storage system. With up to 69.5 TB in a single 17.5 square-foot Symmetrix cabinet, the 8830 also offers unmatched levels of enterprise consolidation with more cache, connectivity and processing power than any other enterprise storage system on the market. - Symmetrix 8530 - Providing up to 17.4 TB of capacity in a 6 square-foot single-bay Symmetrix cabinet, the 8530 drives multiple applications and offers denser connectivity and faster performance for the middle of the Symmetrix range. - Symmetrix 8230 - The 8230 delivers Symmetrix performance and functionality in the smallest footprint ever, offering up to 3.5 TB of capacity and flexible connectivity options. Throughput and Performance Enhancements Major advancements in the Symmetrix operating environment, parallel cache technology and processing power: New EMC Enginuity Operating Environment: EMC today announced the newest version of the Enginuity Operating Environment for Symmetrix systems. Enginuity version 5568 supports a world-record 64 GB of global cache, as well as a greater number of Symmetrix addressable volumes - up to an unmatched 8,000 separate addresses. This new operating environment takes full advantage of the world's largest disk capacity, delivering greater throughput and functionality than ever before. Symmetrix Global Cache Director with CacheStorm(TM) Technology: Available today, this industry-first innovation enhances system performance and throughput, improves responsiveness and manages peak workloads, resulting in a cache resource that is up to eight times more efficient than any other information storage system on the market. This technology reduces contention for shared cache memory and optimizes the utilization of system resources, eliminating bottlenecks associated with cache memory by: - Partitioning the global cache memory into 16 independent and concurrently accessible memory regions, enabling the industry's only true storage multitasking; - Delivering a buffering "offload engine" that instantly frees incoming channels and cache from any latency issues; and, - Implementing an intelligent optimizing engine that manages and directs requests for cache resources dynamically. Fault tolerance and redundancy are provided by using highly sophisticated, multi-bit error detection processes. Symmetrix Hardware Performance: Available today, the new Symmetrix 8000 models include major performance enhancements to a number of components, including processor speeds (upgraded from 266MHz PowerPC to 333MHz Power PC), number of processors (increased from a maximum of 32 to a maximum of 80), and total system bandwidth. These new processing advances enable the new Symmetrix models to perform up to 61,760 million instructions per second (MIPS) - six times more than any other information storage system in the industry. These advancements provide the new Symmetrix models with the horsepower needed to drive today's and tomorrow's most advanced information storage software applications. Today, more than 47 software products from third-party vendors have been engineered to leverage the power of Enginuity and the Symmetrix platforms. Information Accessibility and Connectivity 12-Port Fibre Channel Director: Available today, the industry-first internal 12-Port Fibre Channel Director - code-named "Spider" - provides greatly enhanced open systems connectivity with six times more direct host connections - up to 96 - to a single Symmetrix unit. This is the highest level of port density available, at least three times that of any other enterprise storage product in the industry. This new technology lowers total cost of ownership through integrated management and support within the Symmetrix system, faster implementation, greater flexibility in host connectivity options, server consolidation and space savings. The 12-Port Fibre Channel Director is an ideal storage consolidation solution for customers who need a large number of server connections. 4-Port Fibre Channel Director: EMC also introduced the 4-Port Fibre Channel Director, available today and designed for customers with a smaller number of servers who need high availability direct attachment to Symmetrix enterprise storage systems. Capacity Enhancements 181 Gigabyte Drives: Along with the new Symmetrix models, EMC today expanded the use of 181 GB disk drives - introduced first to the industry by EMC - for general purpose use in all Symmetrix storage system applications. In open systems and mainframe environments, the 181 GB disks provide equivalent performance and throughput when compared to 73GB disk drives for a wide range of applications. With this new capacity (69.5 TB), EMC provides the price/performance leadership to enable customers to keep more information available for mission critical applications than ever before. Mainframe Functionality Enhancements: Significant enhancements to the Symmetrix information storage system for mainframe environments (see separate release): - FICON(TM)Channel Director: Supporting native FICON channel connectivity for the Symmetrix 8000 family; - GDPS(TM)Support: Enabling customers to implement IBM's proprietary Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex(TM) (GDPS(TM)) mainframe clustering solution using Symmetrix and SRDF; - Dynamic Parallel Access Volumes and Multiple Allegiance: EMC's support of the PAV/MA throughput-enhancing feature; and, - OS/390 volumes in RAID-10 Configuration: Delivering a mainframe industry-first. Introduced in April 2000, the Symmetrix 8000 family quickly became the most successful and widely accepted enterprise information storage system in the world. Recently awarded the Network Magazine Product of the Year Award (based on price/performance, technical ingenuity, new features, applications and serviceability), Symmetrix systems have proven unmatched in meeting real-world customer business requirements. The new models announced today increase Symmetrix's ability to further surpass those requirements, and provide important new capabilities in connectivity, capacity, performance, and functionality for both mainframe and open systems environments. For more information visit www.emc.com