EMC Rolls Out New Symmetrix Line Featuring Direct Matrix Architecture

Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC "bet the ranch, if you will, on this technology," said CEO Joe Tucci, referring to the new Symmetrix DMX product. The company announced the new offering, which was in development for three years, at a Manhattan event.

"This is the highest-quality product we've ever produced out of the chute," Tucci said. He added that he expects the new DMX line to account for more than half of all Symmetrix products sold by EMC this quarter.

The introduction was highly anticipated, with rival storage providers timing their own announcements in an attempt to steal EMC's thunder. (See Story.)

The new line costs from $409,000 to $2.5 million, depending on configuration.

Key to the rollout is EMC's DMX, or direct matrix architecture, which has been at the heart of $2 billion in R&D spending over the past two years. The DMX architecture is a point-to-point interconnect that exceeds performance of current bus or switch architectures. David Donatelli, EMC's executive vice president of storage platforms operations, said DMX offers dedicated interconnects for data throughput that exceeds the performance of shared bus or shared switch systems.

At its highest-end configuration, a DMX system is designed to run 128 connections that can transport a total of 64 Gbytes of data per second in a data path.

Tucci said that while channel partners remain "lined up" behind EMC's lower-end Clariion storage systems, they can still sign on to resell the new Symmetrix DMX systems.

The new products in the architecture are both monolithic and modular configurations.

The Symmetrix DMX 800 is a mountable configuration of the new storage product and can scale from eight to 16 front-end ports.

The Symmetrix DMX 1000 can scale from eight to 48 front-end ports. The Symmetrix DMX 2000, the highest-end of the line, can scale from eight to 96 front-end ports and from seven to 42 Tbytes of capacity.

A report issued by Dan Tanner of the Aberdeen Group likened the Symmetrix DMX line to the 1964 rollout of the Ford Mustang.

"This Symmetrix has affordability and room-to-grow attributes that should attract new ranges of enterprise buyers," Tanner said.