EMC also announced that it is offering enterprise-class SSDs for its Celerra line. Flash disk can result in up to an eight-fold performance improvement compared to traditional Fibre Channel drives. EMC's flash drives, from STEC, deliver sub-millisecond response times and are 98 percent more energy efficient on an input/output per seconds basis than hard drives, EMC said. The flash disk drives can be mixed with Fibre Channel, or SATA drives to create a multi-tiered storage array.
"By consolidating VMware, Windows, Linux and Unix environments onto a single Celerra NS system, IT managers gain a tremendous amount of flexibility and the ability to deploy and update the latest storage technologies across all application environments as needs dictate," said Steve Scully, an analyst at IDC.
Celerra system users can also now purchase SATA II disk drive technology, which typically use up to a third of the power per terabyte of capacity as traditional 1TB SATA disk drives. The Celerra systems also offer twice as many drives as they had before. For example, the high-end NS-960 integrated with an EMC Clariion CX4, scales up to 960 disks.
The new Celerra NS-120, NS-480, NS-960 and NS-G8 models will be available in early March 2009. The starting list price for the entry-level NS120 is US$37,725, which includes 1.8TB of raw storage, RAID and CIFS support as well as snap-shot capability.