The updates began shipping last month, but EMC waited until this week to generate publicity for them. Independent storage analyst Randy Kerns said the new software demonstrates EMC’s commitment to the Centera, which has been continually developed since its launch in 2002.
Since then other large storage OEMs have piled into the disk archive market – HP with the RISS, StoragTek with the tape-friendly Intellistor, IBM with the DR550, and NetApp with the NearStore, alongside a handful of startups.
Because it got to market so early, the Centera’s installed base and list of integrated third-party applications dwarfs that of any other disk archive.
Kerns said however that that there is room for more vendors. Disk archiving is a net new market. There’s a lot of opportunity out there, he said.
The latest version 3.0 of the CentraStar Centera operating system allows data from different applications to be stored in logical partitions within the same Centera.
This allows customers to control which end-users can access which data, for security or privacy purposes. It also allows customers to limit replication to the data partitions that deserve DR protection, rather than having to replicate the entire contents of a Centera.
The logical partitioning will not however interfere with the single-instance storage of the Centera, which like other object-oriented or CAS storage systems detects and eliminates the storage of duplicate data.
Data shared by applications that are accessing different Centera partitions will only be stored once, in one partition. Other partitions will only store the tag for that data, and the tag will point to the data object itself in another partition.
According to EMC vice president Roy Sanford, most Centera owners are storing data from at least two applications on the same Centera. Typical customers’ first implementations involve two of the devices replicating data to each other, he said.
CentraStar 3.0 also introduces star and chain replication topologies, extending what was previously only one-to-one replication. Star replication involves multiple remote devices replicating data to a central pool of multiple Centeras, while chain replication sees data replicated from one device to a second and then onto a third machine.
Sanford said European banks should be especially attracted to chain replication, because he said it is requirement of the proposed Basel II framework.
Alongside the CentraStar update, EMC has also upgraded the Universal Access appliance that provides a CIFS and NFS-based alternative to the Centera API for third-party application integration.
Version 3.5 of the appliance is now integrated within the Centera, making one less box to manage. It also raises the number of objects that can be accessed via CIFS or NFS from 100m to 200m. Sanford said typical Centera customers store about 10m to 20m objects and maybe 100m in extreme cases.
EMC has also updated its Centera Seek and ChargeBack Reporter tools to be aware of the device’s logical partitions, and has integrated its Centera File Archiver into the Universal Application utility.
