EMC Unwraps 'Spin-Down' Disks

By James Rogers, May 19, 2008, 4:30PM

LAS VEGAS -- EMC unwrapped its first VTL system with power-saving spin-down’ disk technology, and made several backup announcements at its annual EMC World user event here today.

The vendor also unveiled its first VTL offerings containing de-duplication software from Quantum, finally ending months of chatter about the nature of the deal between the two vendors.

Disk Library 4000

The Disk Library 4000 VTL, which contains de-duplication technology OEM’d from Quantum, is the first of the vendor’s disk systems to offer spin-down disks, thanks to a software upgrade that the vendor is offering free of charge to existing users of the 4000 system.“It’s an algorithm that we have built into the software that can spin down the disks when they are not being used,” said Dave Donatelli, EMC’s executive vice president for storage product operations, during a press conference this morning. He explained that the software will be available at the end of July.

EMC first discussed its spin-down disk technology last year in an attempt to boost its green credentials.

Unlike offerings from the likes of Copan and Nexsan, which keep disks idle until they are needed, EMC is taking a similar approach to its rival HDS, which keeps disks spinning and powers them down when they are not needed.

EMC claims that its spin-down disk technology, running in conjunction with low-power 1-Tbyte SATA drives, offers major power savings for disk library users.

“The idea is that by combining the spin-down feature and the low-power disk drives, they can reduce the power required on previous versions of our disk libraries by 47 percent,” said Donatelli. “The first way that users will use this is on the disk library, but over time we will open it up to other applications.”<.p>EMC is also looking extend its spin-down technology across systems in its portfolio, according to Donatelli, although he did not say when this is likely to happen.

Disk Library 3D 1500 and 3D 3000

EMC is touting the LAN-based backup-to-disk systems, which compete with IBM’s DS4000 offerings, as a way for users to perform policy-based de-duplication, thanks to technology from its partner Quantum.

“What you do is that you configure this on a LAN and it allows you to do de-dupe on a scheduled basis,” said Donatelli.

The exec also explained why the vendor opted for Quantum’s de-duplication for the three disk libraries announced today, explaining that Avamar was developed more to de-dupe data at source, as opposed to on disk targets.The 3D 1500 offers up to 35 Tbytes of usable capacity, and the 3D 3000 can store up to 148 Tbytes of data. Both systems use 1-Tbyte SATA disks with RAID 6 and contain optional Fibre Channel ports.

Priced at $115,000 and $230,000, respectively, the 3D 1500 and the 3D 3000 will be available at the end of the month.

Avamar 4.0

EMC overhauled its Avamar backup and de-dupe offering, touting a number of enhancements to the product.

These include support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and expanded client support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Vista, Netware, and Novell Storage Servers.The vendor also unveiled Avamar Data Store Gen 2, which is essentially Avamar 4.0 running on pre-configured EMC storage hardware. A fully configured Data Store Gen 2 could provide enough capacity to store roughly 250 daily full backups of 32 Tbytes of file system data, according to the vendor.

EMC is also looking to extend its Avamar footprint, according to Donatelli. “You will see Avamar in more places than it is today,” he said, but did not reveal where EMC is looking to expand the technology.

Avamar version 4.0 is available immediately with prices starting at $17,000. Data Store Gen 2 will be available later this month, with prices starting at $30,000.

EMC NetWorker Fast Start

NetWorker Fast Start is essentially a pre-packaged software bundle aimed at mid-sized customers, which includes NetWorker server software for Linux or Windows, 20 clients, and support for five applications modules for hot backups.The Fast Start package is available now, priced at $18,500.

EMC is not the only vendor busy making announcements today. In addition to IBM’s green data center tools announced this morning, rival HDS took the wraps off a number of new storage offerings.

These include Storage Command Suite software, which it is pushing as a way for users to manage storage from different vendors, and a set of enhancements to its Universal Storage Platform V.

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.