EMC Finally Expands Centera, But Software Only

EMC Corporation announced new software
capabilities that double the amount of digital objects its EMC Centera
content addressed storage (CAS) system can archive, while making it easier to
manage and secure the fastest growing areas of what IDC calls the Digital
Universe, unchanging electronic content such as medical images, e-mail
records, financial documents, video and audio recordings and others.

To help businesses and organizations keep up with their growth and securely
archive and manage this important information, the newest version of Centera
operating software – CentraStar 4.0 – doubles the amount of objects that
each individual disk drive in a system can hold, with each 500 gigabyte or 750
gigabyte drive now able to hold up to 25 million objects. This is particularly
helpful in managing a very large quantity of small objects. In addition, the
new version of the software, which is available as a free upgrade, improves
the self-management and healing capabilities of Centera systems up to 25
percent faster than previous versions.

"Customer archives are being challenged like never before. Big files are
getting bigger and the quantity of small pieces of information is exploding,"
said Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President, EMC Storage Division. "In the
past, customers were worried about storing millions of emails, while today we
have customers with a billion emails in their archive. With these latest
enhancements, we continue to lead the industry in delivering cost-effective
production class archiving solutions that keep up with the challenges that
customers are facing today."

In addition to supporting more objects and speedier self-healing, the new
version of the CentraStar operating software improves system flexibility and
security. This includes 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. It also
gives administrators additional system logging and auditing capabilities;
including the ability to custom configure password complexity rules for
enhanced security.

John Worrall, Vice President and General Manager for RSA’s Information and
Event Management Group commented, "This doubling of object count is very
helpful to our enVision (TM) application users because while each
security-related log record they archive is only 500 bytes on average, the
sheer quantity of log records that customers collect is in the millions and
even billions per day. While archival of this data is essential to security
compliance needs, the growth rate in archived data is much faster than
customers expected."

Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst, Taneja Group, added, "As more
data is archived, the challenge to secure and protect that information also
increases. The biggest source of problems comes not from storing and managing
large objects but rather from a large number of the tiniest objects you find
in today’s environment. Examples abound: instant messages, RFID codes, text
messages, small audio and video files, etc. EMC continues to evolve the
capabilities of Centera to help keep up with this type of information growth
and continues to build in automated capabilities that that help customers
manage more archived information without adding additional resources. I am
aware of one situation where multiple petabytes are being managed by one
administrator."

With over 4,500 customers and more than 230 petabytes of capacity shipped
since its introduction in 2002, EMC Centera is the active archive market
leader.

CentraStar version 4.0 is currently shipping with all new Centera systems
and is available to existing customers under software maintenance free of
charge. Systems running CentraStar 2.4 and above can be upgraded to CentraStar
4.0.

EMC Corporation