EMC To Unveil New Enterprise NAS Gateway

On Monday, the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage giant plans to unveil the EMC Celerra NSX NAS gateway, along with a new NAS architecture and new software for enterprise data center use. Mark Greenlaw, senior director of NAS product marketing at EMC, said the NSX--the latest in his company's Celerra family of high-end NAS gateways--is based on its new X-Blade architecture.

The NSX enclosure can fit from four to eight X-Blades, each of which can support up to 16 Tbytes of usable storage capacity, giving it the ability to manage between 48 Tbytes and 112 Tbytes of usable capacity. New blades can be installed without disrupting operation of existing blades.

Because the NSX is a NAS gateway, it doesn't have its own integrated storage. Instead, it manages capacity on EMC's Clariion or Symmetrix DMX arrays as if that capacity was part of the NAS appliance, Greenlaw said.

With the new X-Blades, customers can configure the capacity for up to 4,000 separate file systems, each of which can support up to 64 data snapshots, Greenlaw said. They also support N+1 clustering, he added.

The X-Blades include new software to monitor and predict potential problems with the NAS status. There's also a new configuration wizard to simplify the provision of iSCSI storage and support for Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) function for online iSCSI snapshots, Exchange 2003 and SQL 2003, Greenlaw said.

The NSX's new Virtual File System works under Unix and Windows environments to provide a single view of multiple Celerra file systems as a single virtual file system. Under Windows environments, it also uses Microsoft's DFS root to present multiple Windows file systems as a single virtual file system. "This improves the end-user view of the data," Greenlaw said.

Also new is Automated Volume Management, in which EMC has profiled the NSX for capacity, performance or archiving. Greenlaw said customers can select the right profile, and Automated Volume Management will automatically tune such factors as RAID type, array load balancing, striping and meta-volume auto-extension based on the profiles. Customers also can customize their own profiles for specific applications like Oracle or SQL.

The Celerra NSX is scheduled to ship via EMC direct sales and its channel partners next month. The base unit--with four X-Blades, dual management stations, dual UPSes and software--lists for roughly $280,000.