History 2003: EMC Finally in D2D Backup with ATA Clariion

If there was one company we expected to see in disk-to-disk backup well before now, it’s EMC, which, through the words of a succession of CEOs, has never made a secret of its dislike of tape technology.

Until now, however, the company preferred to recommend a second safety Symmetrix, a prohibitively expensive solution for most.

Nearly one year after NetApp, EMC is finally launching its own D2D backup system based on ATA drives.

Even here, however, we have to wonder about their choices. The storage leader already had a high-end ATA disk array in its catalog, the Centera, until now offered only for fixed content data with corresponding software that cost as much as the machine itself.

Why design an entirely new product rather than build from Centera? The answer given at CeBIT by Joel Schwartz, EMC SVP and GM of midrange systems division, was far from convincing: “Centera is much more a software solution.”

The new “Clariion with ATA” model thus allows for midrange Clariion CX400 and CX600 disk arrays to be equipped not only with FC RAID but also RAID-5 (8+1 drives) outfitted with slower, but cheaper and higher-capacity Maxtor 5,400rpm 250GB ATA hard disk drives.

It was the prices, obviously, that had everyone’s expectations up. For Clariion with ATA, EMC is proposing $170,000 for 10TB, or $17/GB, thus much lower than the $35/GB for a strictly FC configuration.

Dell Computer, however, resells the same product for considerably less, $127,000 for the same capacity, i.e. $12.7/GB.

The most recent NetApp Nearstore T150 falls at $10/GB.

According to Schwartz, EMC has already shipped- and billed – over 100TB to customers on the new D2D backup system. As for backup software on the new storage system, EMC has secured the support of CA, CommVault, KVS, Legato and Veritas, in addition to its own Data Manager and Replication Manager software.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 183 on April 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.