Eyeing the burgeoning market for network file serving being forged by the likes of Auspex, Invincible Technologies, Network Appliances and Sun Microsystems, EMC Corp has decided it’s high-time it got in on the act and is to offer new hardware and software it will market for use with its Symmetrix disk subsystems, beginning with a Network File System offering. In addition Symmetrix users can now also do bulk transfer and back-up of files between mainframe and Unix systems over direct Escon and SCSI connections rather than network ftp connections when using a new EMC file transfer technique in conjunction with other Innovation Data Processing backup software. The $125,000 Symmetrix Network Storage Director is currently a Pentium-based device running Network File System services – what EMC calls its DART data access in real-time environment – plus a management interface on top of an EMC kernel. EMC says it’s operated using some 30 or so Unix or HTML-based commands. The box front-ends a Symmetrix Integrated Cached Disk Array which scales from 72Gb to 1Tb storage. The whole package is termed the Symmetrix Network File Storage system (SNFS). EMC is targeting the high-end of the file serving business and plans a variants supporting Microsoft Corp’s Common Internet File System (CIFS) Windows-based distributed file sharing system, then possibly Sun’s WebNFS. Data Mover elements allow up to 28 FDDI interconnects. The Hopkington, Massachusetts-based company is also offering the ability for mainframe and Unix customers to do bulk file transfer and backup through direct connections to disk storage when using its new Symmetrix Multihost Transfer Facility software in conjunction with Innovation Data Processing’s Fast Dump and Restore Safeguard Open Storage mechanism. The software allows mainframe and Unix users connected to a common Symmetrix subsystem to use the disk to transfer data from one environment to another. Symmetrix stores data from different system environmen ts on separate disks and partitions the CPU for use accordingly. It doesn’t yet provide true data sharing as is planned for IBM Corp’s Seastar connector planned for 1998. SMTF is priced at $30,000 for Symmetrix 5100 and 3100 systems – $60,000 on the 5500 and 3500s. FDRSOS costs from $12,000. The new software is part of EMC’s previously announced Network-Attached Intelligent Storage System architecture (CI No 2,947).
