EMC Clariion CX3 Ultrascale Systems Achieve Highest Midrange Storage Availability and Quality Benchmark

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that the EMC® CLARiiON® CX3 UltraScale™ family of networked storage systems, at its one year anniversary, is delivering the highest levels of availability for midrange storage arrays. With more than 10,000 systems shipped over the past 12 months alone, and already used by more than 60 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune 500 list, independently affirmed statistics show the market leading EMC CLARiiON CX3 platform achieving coveted “Five 9s” availability – 99.999% of uptime.

Traditionally, only high-end storage systems designed for the most mission-critical applications have delivered “Five 9s” availability. EMC designed an entirely new midrange architecture – UltraScale – to deliver the highest levels of availability in affordable, scalable and easy-to-use systems that meet a wide range of storage needs. Over the past year, EMC utilized a comprehensive Six Sigma-based approach to track and calculate availability metrics of both the Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel/iSCSI versions of the EMC CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale systems, including a thorough analysis of the root cause of unplanned customer system downtime whether hardware, software or process-related.

“Today, customers of all sizes expect midrange platforms to have high-end networked storage features and capabilities that were once the province of large organizations, including Five 9’s availability,” said Brad Nisbet, program manager at IDC. “EMC has made significant investments in developing a highly reliable midrange architecture that is capable of meeting the high-end features, capabilities, and budgetary requirements of their customers. Our analysis of EMC’s policies, practices and procedures confirms that they have implemented a comprehensive, thorough approach to analyzing and quantifying their system metrics so that customers can know what availability to expect from EMC’s CLARiiON CX3 systems.”

Wade Stringer, Information Systems Architect, Syracuse University, said, “Our IT group provides email and file sharing directories to nearly 25,000 faculty, staff and students at the main campus alone, and successful business operations and student development depend on this information being available at all times. The EMC CLARiiON CX3-80 UltraScale systems we use to store and manage this data have proven to be highly available and reliable technology that allows us to work smarter – not harder – and lower our total cost of ownership. They will also scale to meet the university’s growing information availability requirements around the world.”

The EMC CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale architecture also incorporates the EMC UltraPoint™ technology for back-end functionality. First introduced in August 2005, EMC developed UltraPoint to provide better isolation of error conditions while reducing the loop latency of the FC protocol, thereby increasing the performance of the system. In addition, the EMC CLARiiON CX3 series is designed with redundant power and cooling capabilities and features improved fault detection, isolation and error-correction functions. The EMC CLARiiON CX3 Series also features Proactive Hot Sparing to proactively copy data to a spare disk when the system senses a drive is beginning to fail. This reduces drive rebuild times and increases the availability of the array.

EMC Extends Benefits of EMC CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale Technology to Environments Requiring the Highest Levels of Reliability and Ruggedness

Network Equipment Building System (NEBS) Level 3 and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) EN 300 386 certification is further validation of the quality and reliability of the EMC CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale systems. This certification is the result of the successful completion of rigorous testing for reliability and serviceability in adverse conditions. The NEBS Level 3 and ETSI EN 300 386 compliant EMC CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale systems are capable of being deployed in mobile and remote environments by customers such as government agencies, telecommunications companies and those in the oil and gas industry.

Rich Napolitano, EMC Senior Vice President, Storage Products Operations, said, “Over the past year, the EMC CLARiiON CX3 UltraScale systems have become the benchmark for midrange storage and are in use at thousands of customers sites around the world. They were designed from the ground up to provide industry leading levels of reliability, flexibility, performance and ease-of-use. Achieving ‘Five 9s’ of availability is a great milestone, but it is one that requires a constant focus and commitment to the highest levels of product quality in order to maintain.”