News

Storage Vendors Beef Up Disk Arrays

• By Scott Bekker
• 09/17/2001

Going into Networld+Interop last week, EMC unveiled three new models in its high-end Symmetrix line.

The largest of the three, the Symmetrix 8830, now boasts up to 69.5 TB in a 17.5 square-foot cabinet, using the 181-GB disks. The other two models, which like the 8830 began shipping last Monday, are the 17.4-TB capacity Symmetrix 8530 and the 3.5-TB-capable Symmetrix 8230.

HP, which resells disk arrays from Hitachi, will begin shipping 181-GB drives in September, a development that will increase the capacity of the HP Surestore Disk Array XP512 to 93 TB. HP also announced that its homegrown HP Surestore Tape Library 10/100 will grow in maximum capacity to 10 TB in November.

Compaq and IBM currently have high-end disk arrays with capacities in the range of 12 TB, a milestone NAS vendor Network Appliance says it is closing on.

At N+I, Network Appliance disclosed plans to increase the capacity of its high-end F880 filer from its current 6 GB maximum to 9 GB with an upcoming release of software. Network Appliance also offers a clustered filer, called the F880c, which scales to 12 TB and will go to 18 TB with the upgrade. NetApp arrives at the number by combining the capacity of two clustered NAS filers.

According to NetApp, the biggest improvement in the F880 immediately is in throughput. The F880 and F880c represent NetApp's first multiprocessor NAS devices.

Maxtor, a PC and server disk drive maker that moved into disk enclosures, launched its entry into the enterprise storage market at N+I with a 5.7-TB NAS server built on the Microsoft's Server Appliance Kit 2.0.