EMC Corporation today unveiled the fastest, most advanced network attached storage (NAS) system in the world. The new high-end EMC Celerra? NSX NAS gateway delivers up to 300,000 NFS operations per second. Combined with new Celerra software functionality also announced today, this data-center-class solution enables customers to scale higher, faster and more cost effectively than ever before.

With new EMC-designed-and-built X-Blade server technology with N+1 clustering, the EMC Celerra NSX can scale performance using simple online upgrades that let customers easily and nondisruptively deploy up to eight X-Blades. The Celerra NSX and new functionality helps customers lower costs and achieve information lifecycle management (ILM) benefits by consolidating direct attached storage (DAS) with iSCSI, automating the creation of tiered storage for NAS and transparently moving data from one tier to the next with unprecedented scale and simplified management.

The Celerra NSX is the highest-performing and best price/performance NAS system in the industry. Compared with the Network Appliance GF980C, an eight-blade EMC Celerra NSX delivers more than four times the NFS operations-per-second performance and 68% better price performance. For nearly a decade, EMC has been the technology leader in high-end NAS systems that have been deployed worldwide by thousands of customers who are looking for high levels of availability, functionality and performance.

The new Celerra software delivers more scalable management capabilities and better ease of use. New virtual filesystem technology simplifies the management of file systems as customers' capacities grow. This technology presents multiple independent filesystems as a single, virtual filesystem for easier administration, access, manageability and control.

Adam Zimmerman is the Storage Administrator for Phoenix Newspapers Inc. (PNI) the subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc. responsible for publishing The Arizona Republic, azcentral.com and other sites. Zimmerman said, "Our goal is to be a technologically advanced, integrated information services company that provides people with information they need, when they need it, and through whatever medium they choose to receive it. We use EMC Celerra to help us meet the needs of millions of readers. EMC has made dramatic ease-of-use improvements for replication and configuration management. The new point-and-click capabilities save us time and help us test and modify functions like replication faster and more easily."

The new Celerra software also delivers the new Celerra Automated Volume Management which, via the Celerra graphical user interface, lets customers easily create optimized system configurations based on predefined workload characteristics. This capability dramatically reduces planning and management tasks.

Also announced today is the new EMC Centera FileArchiver (CFA) software that integrates with the open EMC Celerra FileMover application programming interface (API) to deliver policy-based data management and movement. For customers with tiered, networked storage including EMC Centera™ content addressed storage (CAS), Centera FileArchiver will migrate static data from the EMC Celerra NAS system directly to the Centera CAS active enterprise archive.

David Donatelli, EMC Executive Vice President of Storage Platforms Operations, said, "The EMC Celerra NSX represents a new standard in NAS, and it's a standard that our competition cannot match. Customers turn to EMC for complete solutions, not point products, to deliver the benefits of an ILM strategy. The EMC Celerra NSX, as part of an ILM initiative, enables customers to reduce their number of file servers, to consolidate storage, and to leverage their existing investments in storage area network (SAN) infrastructures."

Additional Celerra NSX benefits include high-availability features such as redundant hot-swappable components, N+1 clustering, dual control stations, and dual uninterrupted power systems (UPS). To improve scalability, the Celerra NSX supports up to 16 terabytes of usable capacity per X-Blade, with a maximum system capacity of 112 terabytes. With a new RAID 3 data protection scheme, the Celerra NSX can deliver excellent performance for multimedia applications.

Randy Kerns, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group, said, "NAS Gateways continue to experience tremendous customer adoption for consolidation in enterprise environments. EMC has a long history of delivering high-end gateways and has used its data center experience to develop systems that feature high performance, high availability and advanced functionality. The X-Blade server technology represents continued NAS innovation from EMC. The EMC Celerra NSX systems will be an attractive offering to customers looking for the cost and time savings and other efficiencies of consolidating their NAS environments."

Pricing and Ordering Information

The new Celerra NSX systems will be available from EMC and its partners in May, 2005. A four-X-Blade Celerra NSX system has a list price of $278,250. This configuration includes dual management stations, dual uninterrupted power systems (UPS), the CIFS protocol, EMC Celerra SnapSure for local replication, and EMC Celerra Manager for web-based management.