EMC's Centera Upgrade Deconstructed

Ever since reporting on anticipated Centera upgrades last spring, I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. But EMC's latest Centera enhancement seems pretty innocuous, if you ask me. (In truth, no one has, but that's beside the point!)

In a nutshell, Centera's operating system, CentraStar 4.0, has been tweaked with a number of seemingly minor improvements that don't really herald the dramatic overhaul some industry observers have led us to expect. Here are the upgrades:

Upgrade No. 1: Ability of Centera software to recognize 25 million data objects instead of about 12.5 million.

At least one analyst says this is important. According to Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group, customers complained about former limitations of Centera to handle multiple small files (email messages being the classic example). They worked around the issue, he says, by creating larger files or objects containing lots of little ones. This in turn led to taking an extra step or two when a data item needed to be located.

"It's all about how quickly you can do something," Taneja says. Having the object immediately searchable will save time. It also avoids any ingestion delays that may be caused when a large file or object ties up the system because it has to be searched to locate a smaller item.Still awake? Good. Let's look at the other upgrades:

Upgrade No. 2: Ability of Centera software to self-manage and self-heal up to 25 percent faster than previous versions.

EMC doesn't elaborate much on this one. I'm not sure I have the patience to pursue it further.

Upgrade No. 3: A new capability that "enables administrators to segregate, configure and separately manage application, management, and replication traffic for the optimal mix of performance and protection."

Ah! That sounds important. Could this be a sneaky way to introduce the building blocks of that global storage repository Joe Tucci rattled on about last November?Apparently not. EMC says the feature in question lets you take a look at what's going on when you're replicating from one Centera to another. Oh, and of course, it makes it all faster.

The pricing of Centera (starting at $77,000) remains the same. And the hardware still comprises 500- or 750-Gbyte drives. In short, a little improvement here, a little there. This is the software upgrade meant to accompany the hardware improvement introduced with the Centera Generation 4 LP (low power) model last July.

Doggone! I've been expecting that unified Recovery Management Console, or its follow-on Intelligent Information Console, to take shape in an existing EMC product for months now. EMC has indicatd it will surface within two years, after all.

An EMC spokesman says that's still the plan. But it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Centera.

We'll keep watching, though.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.