Alongside a new higher capacity version of the ATA-based hardware and software package, EMC has also launched optional software to make the device comply with the US HIPPA health act, the SEC’s Rule 17a-4, and other regulations concerning the keeping of records.

At the beginning of the year, the company said that in the fourth quarter of 2002 it sold 1PB of total Centera capacity, taking total sales to 2TB since the device was launched in April last year. Yesterday the company said that total sales have now reached 4PB, meaning that it sold 2PB of capacity in the first quarter of this year. The total number of customers that EMC is claiming has not changed since the beginning of the year, and still stands at 150.

The optional software has been christened Centera Compliance Edition. This will expand our current markets, and drive sales deeper into some sectors, said Roy Sanford, vice president of content addressed storage. Sanford named email retention as a key application, as well as electronic content management, and the storing of medical images. He described Rule 17a-4 as the grand-daddy of them all – the gold standard from the storage point of view, and said that among other things it mandates protection against accidental overwriting of data, and other data integrity features.

Centera Compliance Edition includes the ability to set hardened and enforced durations of time for which data must be kept, and enhanced shredding of deleted data and access control for systems administrators.

Version 2.0 of the Centera introduces larger ATA disks with 250GB rather than 160GB capacity, a remote replication scheduler and manager, faster Pentium controllers, an SNMP management interface, and a smaller entry-level configuration, down from 5TB to 4TB.

While the previous version of the Centera protected against hardware or software failures by mirroring data objects, the latest version introduces an alternative option to stripe data objects across multiple nodes. Each striped component of data is protected with a parity bit. The RAID 1-style mirroring offered a usable data capacity of only around 50% of the total Centera capacity, but the new RAID 5-style striping will offer around 80% usable space, cutting the Centera purchase cost to around 3 cents per MB. However for what EMC said are architectural reasons, the striping can only be used on Centeras with sixteen or more nodes.

The previous smallest configuration of the Centera previously cost around $204,000 for 10TB of raw capacity, and now costs around $148,000 for 8TB of raw capacity. The reduced price per MB is associated with the use of the larger ATA disk drives.

Source: Computerwire