EMC extends high-end NAS technology leadership with industry's highest performing NAS system

The new high-end EMC Celerra® NSX NAS gateway is set to deliver up to 300,000 network file system (NFS) operations per second. Combined with new Celerra software functionality also announced today, this data-center-class solution will enable regional 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.

"With the introduction of the Celerra® NSX NAS gateway, EMC has firmly established itself as the market leader in one of the fastest-growing storage segments in the Middle East's IT market. The unparalleled choice and superior business value offered by this new NAS gateway technology is certain to encourage existing customers to upgrade their systems, while driving potential customers looking for high levels of availability, functionality and performance to deploy EMC's effective NAS solutions," said Mohammed Amin, general manager, EMC Middle East.

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.

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.

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.

"Regional 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," added Amin.

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.