The Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based company lost ground to both HDS and IBM Corp’s rival Shark at the high end of the storage array market during 2002 as users waited for the launch of the DMX architecture.

That delay also saw the company suffer a revenue drop, but with the long-awaited DMX architecture now available, Lewis said he believes the company is about to bounce back. This will be one of the quickest product transitions in our history, he said. We expect in the first quarter, which has already started, to have half our revenue at the high end come from the new products.

Market share figures for the third quarter of 2002 from investment bank AG Edwards gave EMC 39.9% of the high-end array market, with HDS’s Lightning just behind with 37.4%. The fact that EMC’s share was down 51.2%, while HDS climbed 30%, combined with a delay in orders from customers waiting for DMX indicates that EMC may well have lost its high-end storage crown by the time figures for the fourth quarter are published.

Despite that speculation, Lewis denied that the company was on the verge of losing its treasured number-one position.Obviously we’ve had some impact at the high end, you can’t deny that, but if we’re on the verge of anything, we’re on the verge of greatness, not the verge of defeat, he said.

In announcing the DMX, EMC has used phrases such as the most significant advancement for high-end storage customers in a decade. While the likes of HDS and IBM would no doubt disagree with this statement, it certainly rings true to say that it is one of EMC’s most important high-end advancements for more than a decade.

The last time we did this was in 1990, said Chuck Hollis, EMC’s vice president of platforms marketing. The first architecture for the Symmetrix lasted 13 years, but at the end of the 1990s we saw the need for a new storage architecture that could handle ’10x’ growth.

That new architecture is described as the Direct Matrix Architecture, a new point-to-point matrix interconnect that Lewis said is the world’s first storage architecture that is non-blocking. This means that each controller has dedicated communications connectivity to all other controllers.

With the new architecture, EMC believes it can offer over four times the performance of rivals in terms of aggregate bandwidth, five to 10 times the cache bandwidth, four times the backend bandwidth, and nine times the CPU performance.

EMC’s evidence? At this stage EMC only has its own in-house numbers, and it remains to be seen if the company will relax its objections to the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 benchmark and prove its figures.

In the meantime, EMC is expecting customers that have been waiting for the Symmetrix relaunch for some time to jump on the improved models and give a much-needed uptick to EMC’s high-end market share figures.

Source: Computerwire