EMC releases new Celerra NS series

BANGALORE, INDIA: EMC Corporation, a provider of information infrastructure solutions, announced a new line-up of EMC Celerra unified storage systems, NS-120, NS-480, NS-960 and NS-G8 gateway. 

The new NS models combined new software innovations, including file system de-duplication, file-level retention and compliance capabilities with the five-nines (99.999 percent) reliability and advanced capabilities of EMC CLARiiON CX4 storage systems to provide upto 22 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to other systems in the market.

These new features expanded upon existing built-in capabilities, including advanced IP storage replication, automated volume management for optimised storage tiering and thin provisioning.

The new Celerra NS-120, NS-480, NS-960, and NS-G8 Gateway systems provide:

Power and Capacity Efficiencies
o Celerra data de-duplication with compression for primary file systems and end user file data in VMware and other virtualised environments. Included at no additional cost, this feature maximises storage efficiency by eliminating redundant data and can reduce filesystem capacity up to 50 percent.

Celerra Data De-duplication featured an intuitive single-click startup with automated policies and is fully integrated into Celerra Manager for added ease of use. The integration of technologies from EMC Avamar and EMC RecoverPoint into the Celerra operating environment enables compression on all inactive files, then removes duplicates on the Celerra, without imposing limits on supported file system sizes or use of functionality like snapshots. 

o Enterprise Flash Drive technology for Celerra, which stored data on highly reliable flash memory, could result in upto an 800 percent performance improvement compared to traditional fibre channel drives. Enterprise flash drives deliver sub-millisecond response times and are 98 percent more energy efficient on an IOPs (Input/Output operations Per Second) basis.

o Low Power SATA II disk drive technology on Celerra systems enabled optimised data placement on Celerra systems, providing more cost-effective storage based on service level requirements. SATA II disk drives required 32 percent less energy per terabyte than traditional one terabyte SATA disk drives. The new Celerra line-up supported mixing of enterprise flash and low power SATA II drives, helping drive down costs, providing flexibility and improving power efficiency. 

 “Our EMC Celerra systems support some of the most critical applications for our university and staff, including 3,000 Exchange clients as well as I/O intensive research applications, the internet presence of more than 250 institutes and the home directories of 35,000 students and staff members,” said Uli Betzler, Senior Storage Architect, KIT. “Given that some of our clients put a very high workload on the systems, we strive to make our VMware, NFS and iSCSI storage environments as efficient as possible.  The Celerra Data Deduplication feature showed a 25 percent reduction in the amount of primary data in our fileservice environment, while improving overall system performance.  Many of the files stored on the Celerra are large and de-duplication will result in cost savings for the KIT with the benefit of faster access to the files. Beyond that, even the small files in typical user profiles show an impressive compression ratio with EMC’s Data Deduplication feature.”

The new Celerra NS-120, NS-480, NS-960 and NS-G8 models would be available from early March, 2009.