Thursday, March 20, 2014

EMC CLARiiON AX4, Low-cost SAN for Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses

To make way for a new line of storage solutions fit for today’s heavily interconnected business environment, the CLARiiON SAN and Celerra NAS (network-attached storage) lines were eventually merged into the now-current VNX line of unified storage solutions. This led to the ultimate discontinuation of the CLARiiON line, which included the AX4/AX4-5 SANs. However, supported by providers like Tab Data Systems, the SMB-friendly EMC AX Series still holds on to a significant share of dedicated fans.

The AX4 owes its post-discontinuation success heavily to EMC and Dell’s insightful development of a robust, yet easy-to-use, reliable and secure SAN, well-adapted to the SMB market. Inexpensive yet practical, the storage array line delivered performance that overlapped even its full-featured CX3-10 cousin at a cost that many smaller businesses could afford.

http://www.tabdatasystems.com/emc-clariion-ax4-low-cost-san-for-small-and-medium-sized-businesses/

Thursday, March 13, 2014

EFD: Creating a “SOLID” foundation for EMC storage hardware with “STATE” of the art in EMC hard drives.

With virtually no moving parts unlike its predecessor, solid-state drives (SSD) are a step above the venerable hard disk drive (HDD) in terms of speed and reliability. At start-up, an SSD-equipped computer can take you to your desktop 18 seconds faster on average than one with a HDD. Though speeds vary depending on technology used, even consumer level MLC based SSDs write data a lot faster; around twice as fast as the HDD. SSD technology also provides higher mean time between failure (MTBF) than conventional spin-up drives, a testament to the benefits of no moving parts that create heat, vibration and the dreaded head crashes from shock and mechanical failures.

For the average PC user a few seconds gained may not warrant the relatively high cost per unit of storage with an SSD, but in the world of Big Data every millisecond counts. Even medium size enterprises are slowly making the shift to SSD from HDD due to promises of performance and reliability. Every second saved with faster IOPS (input-output per second), leads to increased efficiency and profits. The latest in EMC storage hardware is helping companies to do just that. But not with just any SSD.

http://www.tabdatasystems.com/efd-creating-a-solid-foundation-for-emc-storage-hardware-with-state-of-the-art-in-emc-hard-drives/