Having demonstrated by its still surging figures that IBM Corp’s Ramac is a paper tiger, Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC Corp is not about to relax the pressure, and it has enhanced its Symmetrix family of integrated cached disk array storage systems. The Symmetrix 5100 is a configuration for mainframe customers that want to buy in smaller capacity increments, and is designed for users needing up to 136Gb. Options include RAID-1 – disk mirroring, the firm’s new RAID-S, which EMC says uses its own software, hardware and data mapping to overcome RAID performance shortcomings, and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility. The Symmetrix 5100 supports from eight to 16 5.25 9Gb drives, and supports Escon, Parallel and Fast Wide Differential SCSI channels, and costs between $440,000 and $660,000 depending on initial capacity. RAID-S calculates disk parity at the disk drive as opposed to the controller, freeing the controller to process inut-output requests. EMC also announced that it is now using 4Gb 3.5 disks into its Symmetrix 5200 system.
